Like Judy McKie and Wendell Fortress, Garry Knox Bennett arrived in woodworking after attending artwork faculty and by no means acquired formal coaching within the craft. Additionally like them, he had a mind teeming with uncommon concepts and an unlimited drive to get issues made.
Drawing was second nature to Bennett, however he didn’t waste time with it earlier than making a bit of furnishings. “I don’t do any drawing besides proper on the wooden, on the bandsaw,” he stated. He might see his items earlier than he made them. “I work out most of my designs at night time as an alternative of counting sheep. Then I come into the store the subsequent day and begin sawing.”
He made practically all his work on hypothesis and in collection. He would select a furnishings kind—the chair, the clock, the bench, the eating desk—and make a dozen, two dozen, three dozen of them in a stretch, every one completely different. The items in a collection might need a shared structural method, however the completed items would look nothing alike. His collection of trestle tables, for instance, all had skinny, mild tops and heavy bases, and the identical subtle methods he devised for attaching and supporting the tops and for becoming a member of the trestle assemblies have been utilized to a lot of them. However the exuberant shaping of the trestles, and the colours, textures, and supplies he used diverse wildly. The shared structural method enabled him to work at a breakneck tempo; when constructing his trestle tables he was making one per week.
Bennett’s work will be off-putting. Full of concepts and at all times exclamatory, it strikes some as bombastic and ungainly. That’s the best way I felt about a lot of it after I had seen it solely in photographs. Then I attended a big present of his work and located that in individual the identical items may very well be pleasant. The vary of supplies and the dexterity with which he employed them have been a revelation. The work was wealthy with element that might learn as busy from afar however stunning up shut.
Bennett was a provocateur; though plugged into the furnishings world, he was decided to not play by its guidelines. His work drew on conventional furnishings types, buildings, and joinery, but it surely was by no means enslaved to them, and he typically made sport of the worshipful angle towards wooden and conventional craftsmanship that he noticed round him. When his Nail Cupboard ran on the again cowl of High-quality Woodworking in 1979, it ignited a hearth within the editor’s inbox and led to fairly a number of canceled subscriptions. Bennett had constructed a show cupboard in padouk—decorous and dovetailed—after which pushed a carpenter’s nail into considered one of its doorways. “I wished to make a press release,” he stated. “I feel difficult joinery is simply to point out, in most cases, you are able to do difficult joinery.” His provocation might need succeeded too properly. A long time later, having made hundreds of items of furnishings that have been bursting with creativity (and never a bit of difficult joinery) and that offered broadly and wound up in museums, he stored listening to about one specific piece. “I’m sick of the Nail Cupboard,” he stated.
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