Osgood

Jere Osgood started making furnishings as a younger boy in his father’s basement workshop in Staten Island, N.Y., having realized woodworking from his uncles and grandfather. Quickly, he was promoting items to his neighbors. By the point he turned a scholar of Tage Frid’s at RIT in 1958 at age 22, Osgood had been promoting items of his personal design at craft galleries in Manhattan and had even invented some new joinery. Unimpressed, Frid instructed him to neglect every thing he knew and begin over.

Osgood’s have an effect on—light, very soft-spoken, and intensely reserved—was the other of Frid’s. However his metal and his self-confidence had been simply as sturdy. Whereas absorbing a lot from Frid’s instruction, Osgood remained true to his personal imaginative and prescient, and through the years, his furnishings got here to embody increasingly audacious experiments with type, construction, and joinery.

In early problems with High-quality Woodworking, Osgood wrote landmark articles on bent lamination and tapered bent lamination, strategies he perfected and used to make sinuous legs and tapered, curving case sides in a spread of tables, chairs, desks, and case items that type one of the spectacular our bodies of labor of the century. Design across the development, certainly.

Across the bend. It may be a process to discover a straight line in Osgood’s furnishings. Curves had been oxygen for his designs, and he developed strategies of bending and tapering curved elements which have turn into customary practices.

Surprisingly, although possessing none of his mentor’s bravado or verbal drive, Osgood turned one of the influential lecturers of the period. At Boston College’s Program in Artisanry, he and his co-teacher, one other extravagantly proficient former Frid scholar, Alphonse Mattia, led courses that produced an astonishing array of sensible furnishings makers and lecturers whose work ran the gamut from essentially the most conventional to essentially the most heterodox.

The Greatest Woodworker You have By no means Heard of

For 55 years, the wonderful Jere Osgood has blended modesty and mastery

Remembering Jere Osgood, a quiet innovator who bent wooden to his will

Wanting again on the furnishings and philosophy of Jere Osgood, who died Oct. 10, 2023.

A sideboard cloaked in Osgood oak

John Cameron discovered the stack of badly warped English brown oak boards in Jere Osgood’s outbuilding as Osgood was closing his workshop and promoting off his inventory.

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