The Colors Underneath (Part 1 of 4)

Part 1: Exploring the woodworking layer of my evolving canvas

At the high school where I teach, each senior in advanced art takes turns arranging their work on a long gallery wall in the art hallway. During opening week of their showcase, the featured student shares insights into their creative process.

Last week, I was drawn to a piece called “An Unclear Headspace” in Sadie H.’s exhibit. I love layered paintings, collages, and mixed media work, and appreciate how her choice of “unclear” implies chaos and fog and, at the same time, a longing for the clarity this word both contains and denies.

“An Unclear Headspace” is a layered painting with news clippings about violent events partially obscured by a swirling riot of drips and brushstrokes. On the top layer, three images hover above the chaos: a pale blue teacup suspended in mid-fall, a viny flower, and a monarch butterfly. After her talk, I asked Sadie if she could tell me something about the work that wasn’t included in her written description.

“An Unclear Headspace” by Sadie H., shared with her permission. Sadie sold three paintings after her talk. I bought this one so it can continue inspiring me.

She gazed up at the painting and tilted her head, a smile crinkling curlicues of eyeliner near the corners of her eyes. “Yes,” she replied and described how she’d noticed, in a box of gently used canvases, the large, aggressive, black marks a previous student had made on this one and “knew it was the perfect place to begin.”

I’m not starting with a blank expanse either. A jumble of experiences crowd the canvas I’ve set on the easel. Some scraps, like those clippings on Sadie’s painting, are obscured intentionally. Elsewhere, pools of saw-metal gray, violet, river blue, and emerald seep from beneath swaths of school-bus gold.

The steely pools represent my desire to build things—modest, practical things like tables, bookcases, and slide-out cabinet shelves. Although I didn’t inherit my grandfather’s gift for fixing and making things, I admire how it lives on in my brother and had often wondered what it would feel like to build something.

Then, just two months after we’d moved, the pandemic hit. The heightened sense of mortality that swept in with it made me realize that if I’d like to try building, I needed to get going.

I had help. For the first project, a friend took the lead constructing stairs for our shed and I assisted her, enjoying the efficient thwack of the palm nailer despite its ominous name. After we finished, I walked up and down the steps several times, grinning. It felt so different from writing.

Not long after, my wife and I were eating at the table we’d bought from whoever had staged the house. We didn’t have a table then and, though serviceable, its dainty legs and spray paint – black to match the also spray-painted chandelier - were not “us” at all.

I remembered some black walnut boards my parents had in their garage, boards they’d carried from home to home for more than four decades. When I asked if I could use them, they said yes.

That summer, under the tutelage of another talented friend, I built a dining table in his woodshop. It was satisfying and humbling—and it took two years for me to work up the courage to sand, seal, and paint it. I was afraid I’d ruin it, so I made a bench and end table (this time in classes) and finished those first.

From Boards to Table

While I procrastinated, I discovered carving and its slow, quiet, rhythm. Clearly slow is my kind of woodworking. Like those walnut boards, carving came with a nudge from the universe. Let me explain.

Many of the poems I write are a fusion of historical research and poetry. “Coopering Lesson, c. 1855,” one of my earliest documentary poems (you can read it and a few others here), evokes the image of a cooper (barrel maker) seated at a shaving horse, drawing a hollowing knife along a barrel stave, “cedar falling in commas/from his aproned waist.”

At my first carving workshop, the instructor walked in with a shaving horse in his arms. Wide-eyed, I leaned forward, barely suppressing (or perhaps not) the urge to bounce. Then he carried in a stack of cedar logs and showed us how to split them with a hatchet. I couldn’t stop smiling. As I sat on the shaving horse, pulling a drawing knife along a slice of cedar, inhaling its fragrance, joy rose like a sun inside me.

That magical moment when lines from one of my poems came to life in a carving class.

I’m still a novice with a lot to learn before I can make an impact through woodworking. Yet, that hasn’t stopped me from imagining the ways such work might unfold. Here are three.

In the spirit of Project Homes, I could build things for people who need but can’t afford them. I’d planned to volunteer there to practice carpentry, but they only repair houses during school hours. Instead, while I continue to tinker at home, I’ll join some weekend builds with Habitat for Humanity to gain more confidence handling tools, measuring, and cutting.

If carving remains part of my woodworking journey, I’d like to organize a small group ministry at my church to carve pocket-size chalices (the symbol of our Unitarian Universalist faith) for congregants who are grieving or navigating other difficulties. I imagine elder carvers contributing their expertise, and youth joining the circle to paint or oil the chalices or carve their own designs.

And then there’s the possibility of combining woodworking with creative writing like Richmond artist Ruchi Gupta does in her captivating ceramics. Her plate “Unbecoming” features a passage fitting to close this reflection: Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything, maybe it's about unbecoming everything that isn't you, so you can be who you meant to be in the first place.

What might I need to unbecome?

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I’ll delve into Gupta’s musing and the woodworking-writing combo idea when I dive into writing, the deep purple pools on my canvas, next week. In the meantime, I encourage you to add a comment about a detail on your own evolving canvas.