My furniture making began in college as a natural outgrowth of my formal design studies and my undirected woodworking, including my fledgling career as a luthier.   In school I had "history of the decorative arts" introducing me to the masters, I had sculpture classes showing me form, metal and woodworking classes showing me materials and how to use them, and design classes showing me how to conceive and document in two-dimension something which wants to live in three-dimension.   Really these classes were merely appetizers to my own course of study while at university; a study which will last as long as I live.   I could classify my work by any number of means, but since history and ethnology is time and again my starting point, I will group my work with that mind.  

Traditional Scandinavian.  
I have adopted a signature apron/stretcher detail which is found on rustic Swedish furniture dating from the 1500's.   It is a symmetrical cutout of a broad radius sloping up to a short corner occurring at the diameter of a half-circle crown.   It is an amusing focal point on the stretchers of several trestle-base workbenches I have made as well as table aprons and panel-leg stools. I have chosen this idiom for my workbenches and other hard-working utilitarian pieces for it's rational forms, heavy massing and simple detailing.

Shaker .  
The utilitarian in me is naturally drawn to this style.   I have read much about the Shakers and seen many original examples of the work.   "Hands to work, Hearts to God" has become one of my personal mottos.  I have taken the use of   "local woods" and spare, "unencumbered" detailing to new extremes.   The quotations poke fun at my own desperate acts of economy and straight-forward woodworking by using lumber-yard pine and other off-the-shelf devices to make furniture quickly and on the cheap which would be otherwise if I copied a piece exactly.   I have produced dining tables, workbenches and bookshelves from 2x lumber, which after it is run through a bench planer, removing rounded corners and, when necessary for large posts laminating the stock, produces some fine pieces which even the educated onlooker would not divine the plebeian source material.   It was along those same lines I adapted the famous Canterbury, New Hampshire bench.   The original has turned legs, shaped back spindles and a back rail with carved volutes.   My version has the same distinctive lobed seat shape, in pine, but is made out of planed-to-thickness layed-up 2x.   It is uncarved and the thickened portion at the rear of the seat to accept the spindles is achieved with a simple lamination of 1x with a beveled edge to indicate the original carving.   The legs are three pairs as the original but, to avoid the simple yet time-consuming turning, are squared with a stretcher in a trestle arrangement. In place of shaped spindles I have dowel rods and the ends of the back rail are merely canted.   The end product, painted an historical shade of green, is a bench which immediately recalls the form and utility of the original, lacking admittedly some of the grace and proportion.   But I made two of them in under 8 hours and it cost an insignificant amount

Gothic Revival, Edwardian, and English Arts and Crafts. 
Distinct styles, but lumped together by my own meddling.   I have produced a suite of office-type furniture out of oak, stained dark, which lifts forms, details and mechanical curiosities from this quadrant of 19 th c. England.   I am as close a follower of William Morris as I dare without being a card-carrying Socialist. I am currently reading the two volumes of his collected letters and being confirmed in what I've believed all along: That the products of our craftspeople can speak loudest of all about the spiritual health of our society. And that era! Dolmetch at Halesmere breaking the dawn of the early music revival along with the Pre-raphaelites drawing back the dark drapery covering antiquity revealing new vibrant colors. The age of Whistler and Ruskin, when a man could be both Statesman and Artist and the line between could be indistinguishable. The designer in me is mesmerize by the baroquely-cluttered Edwardian interiors, with every available surface embellished and every space occupied, not disordered but with a complex harmony, one object playing off the other to tell the story of the inhabitant. My spaces are like this.

Bauhaus.  
It hit in High School. It hit hard and stayed with me through college, and I am still haunted by that Kaiser's cavalryman.   If I could go back in time and sit down to tea with one person it would either be Gandhi or Walter Gropius.   "What were you thinking???" would be the first question.   Considering the exciting yet Victorian climate of Weimar Germany, the proto-hippy commune ideas behind Gropius' school make its appearance downright shocking. Ideas which 80 years later are still considered edgy and much philosophized. Tubular steel does not have much of a place in a woodworker's studio, but much of the way I look at the chair, a machine for sitting, comes from Breuer and Loos and Moser,  and Mies.   I drew a straight line from Provençal pre-industrial revolution furniture, through the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19 th .c to the Bauhaus. The common thread is form follows function. No element of the design exists unless if contributes to the larger function. No curve is made for the benefit of the eye that is not sanctioned by the structure. Carving and embellishment is an anathema pronounced by the raw material itself.

American colonial.   
I have admired the work at Williamsburg since my visit there as a youngster and harbor the dream of being a journeyman in the same cabinet shop that produced those wonderful 18th c. harpsichords. My 30th birthday present to myself was attending a three-day workshop by a visiting Colonial chair maker, whom I met at the Yellow Daisy Festival at Stone Mountain Park. (An entertaining event known more for crafty crap than fine craftspeople) The project was a "sack-back" windsor chair. I had read much about this piece of furniture and the craftsmen of the American Colonial period have always captivated my imagination. This was a traditionalist maker and we got the top-to-bottom education, excluding only the turning of the legs for time constraint reasons (a skill I already possessed anyhow) and the steam bending of the hoops (an apparatus I intend to construct for my next chair) Perhaps most satisfying was learning how to use an adz and travisher to scoop out the seat. Most of my work in this style has been at the library, however besides the chair I have made several wall-hung bookshelves of the scalloped-panel variety. One ongoing project is a series of turned walking staffs based on colonial examples. I intend to make another trip to the Smithsonian collection in the near future to their excellent costume division.

Bowl Surgery.   
On the lighter side is my bowl making. After years of just spindle turning I got into bowls through an unlikly source. I volunteered at an Episcopal mission in downtown atlanta run by one of the ex-bishops of the diocese. We taught the neighborhood kids how to turn bowls, pens, and do other woodworking projects. So i learned bowl turning from a bishop. Turning a big chunk of wood with a huge gouge and shavings flying everywhere is a great release after hunching over tiny lute pegs for 8 hours. I always use wood with a story. My first series of bowls we made from a red maple tree that fell in Olmstead Park from a storm. It was certainly planted by Olmstead 100 years ago.

The latest bowls to roll off the lathe. The two on the ends are from a neighbor's redbud tree that came down in the last hurricane. The photo doesn't do the wood justice. There are bright pinks, green, yellow and rich brown pith and veining.

Pipe Making.   
Just for fun I'm making some tobacco pipes influenced by the church warden style but with a turned (instead of carved) bowl

A tobacco pipe in boxwood. A 'key' is inserted into a blind hole in the bottom for holding the pipe while smoking. There is a temporary aluminum tube that will be replaced with stainless steel. This design is based on English 18thc. long pipes, but this is just a prototype and I haven't fully researched the style.

A Workshop Design.

The Betsill workshop is moving. I'm finally in the new house in Stone Mountain although decorating and moving the bulk of my workshop contents is in progress. The dream is to build a barn in the woods in the not-too-distant future. Click on the above image to see my original design for a workshop/apartment barn structure.

Bring it HOME.