- Aluminum.
ColorCore, I love this stuff.
I started making furniture a long time ago,
but it never occurred to me that really,
in a way that people make furniture.
You know, I didn't think anybody did this.
[playful music]
I've chosen to work with color because
I wanna try to do something that really pushes,
you know, really pushes me.
I wanted to use the foil of that
late 19th century café chair against something
actually very modern, modern color, modern materials.
So I didn't want a wood top.
And aluminum is so stable, and so strong,
and I can mount these bolts under here.
Hey, Alison, you want to give me a hand?
Make sure those pop in the hole back there.
Look at that; it fits.
So that's it.
That's gonna be, this is a hall table and chair.
I like to use green because it's so hard to work with.
I like that challenge.
So making a green chair is tough,
but if you incorporate a lot of gold, you're safe.
When I made this, I wasn't a chair maker,
and I put, kind of my hallmark, you know, this line.
I see people make something all rectilinear,
they can be very nice, and I see people make things
with curves, and you're all curves,
and they get kinda boring, so you need a foil.
You know, so I try to do that.
[jazz music]
I went to art school, and I started out as a painter,
but I immediately found the sculpture studio.
I mean, I spent all my time there,
and I really, I liked three-dimensional work.
Arts and crafts was absolute freedom for me.
I found myself in a class,
I had a Camel cigarette in one hand,
piece of charcoal in the other,
and a beer on the table next to me,
and a naked woman in front of me.
What the hell?
I'm gonna be an artist.
You notice I'm measuring this very carefully.
- I knew him in high school.
We didn't date in high school or anything.
We got together after high school and then
we lost contact, and then I just looked him up one day.
He was just interesting.
Really very comfortable to be around.
- When she knocked at my door,
I was sitting there listening to music,
and we had a Dutch door with a glass window,
and there was Sylvia.
All right, sweetie, let's go out and have a little lunch.
And not too long after, we were married.
Here? Really?
Sit in these dumb chairs? [Sylvia laughs]
Za zdarovie!
Then I had to make a living.
I had a wife and three kids,
and so I started a little business.
It was an amazing, fortuitous thing,
meeting my wife and making roach clips,
just at the right moment.
You know, some people just get to be
in the right moment of life, you know.
And Sylvia knocked at my door one day,
and the flower people came to Frisco.
[lively music]
You can't believe what the Haight-Ashbury was.
It was, damn, it was really good.
So I would spend a couple weeks
hammering out roach clips, and they'd buy 'em from me.
Made millions of roach clips.
I was big man on campus over there.
I was the roach clip mogul.
God, those were...
God bless the hippies.
Oh, they loved that, they loved anything ugly.
My movement into craft, I guess, for lack of a better word,
started with the clocks, and they were small,
and I didn't have very many tools here.
When the hell did I make this?
It says, "1974, I still love her."
And then I think, I said, "Well, I need some wooden cases
in these clocks," so I got a few tools,
and it just happened very slowly.
I was starting to make furniture,
but Jesus, man, I didn't know anything about it.
I mean, I really didn't; I mean, I just said,
"I think I'll make furniture."
I mean, it's like, "I think I'll make a rocket ship."
You know, I mean it's, God,
you have no skills, you have no training, you know.
You don't know anything about it,
but it was like, that's a good idea.
Watch this.
You know, worked out.
So that's how I got into furniture.
I like furniture.
I can think furniture.
I can see furniture.
You know, I can see it up here.
What'll motivate a series is, like, something I want to do,
like make benches, or lamps, or something like that.
And then, each one feeds on the next.
I'm kind of a loner, in a way.
I don't see myself as a traditionalist.
I hope I'm, at times, carving a little bit of new ground.
- You know, Garry made this cabinet some years back.
Really, a beautifully crafted thing.
Really incredible surfaces, and then inside of it
was this big nail, crooked bent nail, that he drove into it.
- Garry: It was almost, it was beyond my skills, at the time,
to make that, and then as I got further and further
into this thing, I just started gettin'
so pissed off at it because it was getting so precious,
and that's probably when I decided, as Arthur Dento said,
he put beauty on his knee and he spanked her.
So the nail had to be.
It just had to be.
- And I asked him, "Did you do that
"just to piss people off?
Because it sure works."
That's how I felt about it.
But now that I think about it,
after, you know, years of hindsight,
I think it was a touch of genius.
He's an iconoclast, you know.
He likes to put people to the test.
It's all in good fun, of course, but he likes to do it.
- Driving that nail was a really big deal in my life.
I mean, that nail cabinet just put me
on the woodworkers map.
I'm so sick and tired of talkin' about the nail cabinet.
So okay, is that good?