For Christmas this year, my father gave me a wood planer. An power wood planer. I have had an increasing interest in wood, more specifically old wood. Growing up on a farm in Ohio, there is lots of old wood. So on Christmas day, my father and I rummaged through the barn on the farm and spent a snowy afternoon sawing and planing old cedar fenceposts that, for a better part of the 1900’s, were set squarely and stately upright in the dirt on the farm.
Cedar is a good wood for anything outdoors, and especially for wood that will be in the ground – cedar scarcely rots and is indifferent to water. These hand-milled posts average 4″ square and gain girth towards the bottom end, and were painted white on numerous occasions ( I can remember painting them at least once, when I had to reach up to brush the top board.). They served as the boundary between the front yard and what we called the “front field”, (we got to mow that grass with a bigger tractor) and the white board fence also ran along the northern edge of the property near the house. In the summer time, especially in the immediate years after a painting, and after a mowing, the fence looked a row of formal guardsmen, defending the yard, and though we never had horses on the property in my youth (my dad did) it always felt very much like a Kentucky horse park.
For my inaugural cuts with my new planer we kept it simple. My father and I sawed a single post into 5 pieces. Two of which I made into letter holders with a few additional cuts. The bottom end of the post – the end that spend its working years underground, was never painted and over the years began to decay in modest terms. This quality proved to be a great material for the planer, which, with my new tool, allowed me to shear away as much – or as little – weathered wood as I saw fit. This process, in the words of my friend David Herbold “reveals the biography of the wood beneath”. David is engaged in The University of Idaho’s MFA program in sculpture at Moscow, Idaho. He was sent a mid section of the post as a token from me to do with as he saw fit; be it he burn it for warmth and spectacle, cut it into cross sections for beer coasters, or any of the wonderful things he does with objects he is at liberty to do, so long as it brings him pleasure.
A bottom most section – with only a part painted white, was cut cross-wise three times at a 35 degree angle with my father’s table saw about 3/5 of the way through the post. This piece was planed and oiled and was given to Claire Bow to keep her paper bills, photography payments sent by post, and most notable – her letters from her friend Lauren.
The top portion of the post that was above ground – and painted white – revealed great contrast when a planed side was left adjacent between two untouched edges. I gave that one to my good friend Adám Bové, it is relatively successful in retaining his current inventory of NetFlix DVDs on the living room table. Adam enjoys a nice film now and then when he is not out on some elevated and forsaken granite wall on some remote patch of the planet, climbing and photographing his motley crew of climbers. Included on this prototype is a sardine can for holding anything from ashes to coinage; mostly this addition was an experiment in juxtaposing materials: metal and wood when joined together in a raw fashion has always appealed to me. The three cuts on Adám’s piece are set vertically, which don’t seem quite as functional as the diagonal cuts, which afford the user an easier read of the papers being held.
this is wonderful.