Right Brain Woodworking
by
John Whiteside
©2009

 

“Instead of galloping about, we walk slowly, like a cow or an elephant.
If you walk slowly, without any idea of gain, then you are already a good Zen student.”
- Shunryu Suzuki

 

Is it not true that most of the time when we do something (A), it is for the purpose of achieving some future result (B)? For example, we go to school to prepare for a career. We undertake a career to get ahead, to become financially secure. We pursue financial security in order to retire. And then we retire in order to do what ... to die?

This very brief summary of the purpose of life, under a scenario of always striving for something else, poses, for me at least, two perplexing questions. The first is, how do we know we are striving for the right thing? The second is, when do we get to relax and enjoy life?

What on earth does any of this have to do with woodworking? Simply this: for many years I approached woodworking as a means to an end, a series of preparations and tasks that had to be performed in order to achieve the final result, which was some sort of finished piece. In the process of doing this, while there were moments of excitement and pleasure in the various steps of buying the tools and materials, preparing the stock, drawing the plans (or finding them in a book or magazine), doing the joinery, the glue ups, thinking I was finished except for the finishing, which always seemed to take forever; while there were moments of pleasure in all of this, there were far more moments of impatience, frustration, boredom (with sanding for example), annoyance (at the mess to be cleaned up), anger (when things went wrong), panic (during glue-ups), and self-doubt. And in the end, the results, to be honest, were those of a typical do-it-yourselfer, that is to say, mediocre.

Since then I’ve found a way to work with wood that almost totally does away with the unpleasant and frustrating parts, replacing them with a continuous flow of serenity. And the quality of my work surpasses what I ever though was possible, especially for someone over 60, of average skills, less than perfect eyesight, and arthritis.

Striving for the right thing.  Recently I had the good fortune to be commissioned by an old friend to make a guitar for his son. The project, which took almost a year, was intended as a surprise and when delivery time came, my friend and his son flew in from the Midwest to take delivery. We employed a ruse; the son thought he was coming with his father, who is an executive at General Mills, to inspect one of my pie safes for possible use in a (made up) General Mills pie-making promotional campaign. Instead the son, who is an aspiring folk performer, found himself presented with a hand-made guitar. To say that he was deeply moved is an understatement. Later that evening, when we all went out to dinner, I was trying to explain the woodworking philosophy that I am aiming to explain in this article. The young man said, “Oh, it’s like playing a song. The point of playing a song isn’t to get to the end of it.”

Eureka, I’ve found It. That’s it! If you understand the young man’s comment you don’t have to read the rest of this article. There are certain things, such as playing a song, that are worthwhile in and of themselves, where the activity is its own reward, If you can approach your woodworking so that every step of it is its own reward, your spirit and your level of craftsmanship will soar. The two troubling questions at the beginning of this article are resolved. It’s not a question of striving for some future goal; the singing of each note is its own purpose and reward and brings peace and enjoyment.

The photo to the right  shows the most ambitious piece of woodworking I have ever done.  It is a hand-made guitar rosette. Most rosettes use an ancient Persian technique involving bundles of tiny slivers of differently colored woods oriented so that the end grain points out toward the viewer. My rosette uses the rarer and more difficult technique of side grain inlay. The ebony and cherry pieces of the pattern are oriented so that the side grain, not the end grain, shows. Notice the rich grain patterns in the tiny cherry pieces, selected from a board with unusual figuring. To make this rosette required intricate geometrical constructions and calculations and required the making of 20 jigs such that the average error in sliver thickness did not exceed 1/1000 of an inch. The time required to design and make these jigs was about 200 hours. Even with the jigs completed it takes 20 to 40 hours to make a rosette.

Time to relax People’s reaction has always been the same, “How on earth did you have the patience to do this?” I want to knock them over the head! Patience has absolutely nothing to do with it. The question now seems to me quite odd, as it would seem odd to ask of someone on their birthday, “How on earth did you have the patience to get to the age you are?” Patience has nothing to do with it. Time passes of its own accord. The question is, how are we going to spend it? I cannot conceive a better way to spend 240 hours than making guitar rosettes. The work is fascinating and absorbing. Worldly preoccupations vanish. One’s mind is not on the missed opportunities of youth, nor the stock market, nor on any of the hundreds of troublesome matters that ordinarily preoccupy one’s mind.  Nor, for that matter, is one’s mind much concerned about the future, such as whether one will be laid off or not, how the medical test results will come out, or, most critically, how the rosette itself will come out! This last point is crucial. You do the best you can with the task of the moment, allowing it to command your full attention. For that particular moment, getting that particular sliver (the 17th vertically oriented tapered cherry piece, counting clockwise from the top) to fit just right is the most important thing in the world. You are not, at that moment, worrying about the 23rd piece. Of course, you might learn something on the 17th piece which you can then use to do the 23rd one better but the mental attitude in that case is not, “Oh I didn’t do number 17 as best as possible”; it is rather, “Oh good, I have learned something, I am growing.”

This attitude has fancy names in various systems of philosophy and in certain Eastern religions. One of them is mindfulness. It has also been called being present, being in the moment, or being in the “now”. Hopefully, though, the description in the previous paragraph is concrete enough, especially for woodworkers, that the reader can relate to it without calling it anything at all and it may even call to mind experiences that he or she has had themselves.

First In working in this way, for a number of years now, I have noticed remarkable things. For example when you make a mistake, it doesn’t matter. It is not something to get upset about. Since the work was its own reward, you had the pleasure (gift) of doing the work already. That doesn’t get taken away even if the piece is ruined by the error. You simply start over.

Second Another remarkable result is that the quality of the work improves dramatically and by the only standards that matter: one’s own.  The rosette, for example, is the very best work with wood that I have done to date. Can you find flaws, minor misalignments? Sure. Would it get me into the League? Who knows? Will my rosettes get better in the coming years? They might. But now my goal is not perfection but rather considerations other than craftsmanship and about which I understand yet little, such as the aesthetics of design and how the rosette relates visually to the guitar as a whole. These are the areas I am eager to explore next.

I do not intend any of the above to sound conceited or self satisfied. Please, make your own decisions about the quality of the work. The point is, I am well pleased with it, which is a very rare experience for someone used to second guessing himself. I very much hope that you have had or can find such an experience for yourself.

Third A third remarkable result that I have noticed by working with wood in this mindful manner is that the serenity it generates spreads out into the rest of life. Nagging problems become less acute, regrets and failures lose some of their sting, worries about financial security and mortality give way to an acceptance of the human condition. Naturally, these matters go far beyond the scope of a woodworking article, but they seemed too important and valuable to leave out entirely. For what it’s worth, the key seems to be reminding oneself to focus with gratitude and mindfulness on what one has in the here and now.

What you have read so far relates to my own experience. Some readers will relate to it and be able to put some variation of the ideas into practice for themselves. Others may find it too subjective and need something more tangible and concrete before they are comfortable in experimenting with the ideas in their own woodworking. As it turns out, the study of the functioning of the hemispheres of the human brain may provide that tangible link.

When forgers duplicate something, such as a $100 bill, they do the artwork upside down. Why? Because doing the artwork upside down disengages that part of the brain that takes the shortcuts of abstracting, simplifying, giving things names, and substituting coded representations for reality. You can prove to yourself that this results in a better drawing. Try drawing a copy of a human face using a photograph as your model. You could draw from a photograph of your spouse, or from a picture of a famous person in a magazine. Unless you are a trained artist, your drawing will probably look quite childish.

Now try the same thing, only turning the photograph upside down. Pay attention to the lines and contours and duplicate them as best you can on your paper. Don’t be concerned about naming the various features, simply draw them. You are apt to be quite astonished at the improvement in the quality of your drawing; it may even look something like your model. (If this exercise interests you, check out the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards). I’ll leave it as an exercise to the woodcarvers to figure out how an adaptation of this method might improve the quality of representational woodcarving.

If your interest is turning, check out the brief article “Right Brain, Left Brain” by Cindy Drozada and David Nittmann in the Winter 2008 issue of American Woodturner. They give exercises that force you to turn in one way or the other. For the left brain exercise they have you produce an exact copy of a turning, using measurements, a full-scale drawing, and calipers. For the right brain exercise they have you do the same turning from memory or to a different scale. If you do this exercise, please let me know your results. What I am particularly interested in is the quality of your experience under the two scenarios.

So, what is this right-brain, left-brain stuff? Dredging up memories from my graduate school psychology and neuroanatomy studies, I recall that the two hemispheres of the brain are separate except where they are interconnected by a thick bundle of neurons called the corpus callosum. When I was a student, patients who suffered otherwise untreatable brain seizures were sometime subjected to an operation in which this connection between the two hemispheres was severed. Amazingly the patients survived and the operation did indeed control the seizures.  But something strange happened. It was as though two people with different abilities and opinions now inhabited the same body. And these two people were capable of disagreeing with each other and having different experiences in response to the same situation! To state the matter in a hopelessly oversimplified manner, the left brain person thinks in words and numbers, is calculating and technical whereas the right brain person thinks without words or numbers, is less aware of time, and uses emotions and intuitions.

More recently, Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, suffered a stroke that shut down her left brain entirely. After many years of retraining and rehabilitation she recovered left brain function to the extent that she was able to write a book (“My Stroke of Insight”) about her experiences. This riveting book gives a vivid picture of what it would be like to live entirely in a right brain world - no ability to speak, read, or even think in words or numbers, but at the same time an astonishing awareness of form and beauty and an overwhelming sense of serenity and timelessness!  Indeed, her state of awareness sounds exactly like what yogis and mystics spend decades trying to achieve.

Check the references for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Mine, for what its worth, is this: Our left brain skills and consciousness allow us to function in a complex and technical world. However, though an accident of history and culture, we have allowed the left brain to become dominant, so that instead of being used as a valuable tool, it has, for many of us become the master, overpowering and out-shouting the right brain and in the process, making our lives a lot less serene, artistic, and joyful than they might otherwise be. When you get pissed off at the carving you have just ruined because it didn’t live up to the standard you were hoping to achieve, and you hurl the piece across the shop, your left brain has taken over.

Alternatively, the next time you’re “in the groove” or “in the zone” and your carving, your turning, or your joinery, is really going well, when it’s flowing, take a moment to notice what is happening. Are you even thinking in words? Or have you entered some state where, as the mystics would put it, you are “one with the wood”? That’s what I mean by right-brain woodworking. The left brain is working as it should, as a tool. But it is not calling the shots of your experience with its constant criticisms, analyses, apprehensions, and regrets.

The left brain seems impatient, always worrying about what might happen next. It has a short attention span, in the sense of always wanting to focus on the next problem. The right brain seems not to particularly be aware of the passage of time and is quite happy to spend time in leisurely contemplation, without words. However, it seems to do extremely important work that you, the conscious person, are not aware of while it’s processing. Have you ever had the experience in which a full-blown solution or insight has simply appeared to you in an instant? Something that appears to come from nowhere and then might take you (your left brain) hours to actually put into words, yet all the while the insight is there, clear as crystal?

What does this all mean  How can this be applied to woodworking? How can you use more of your right brain skills and gifts? The left brain is probably overdeveloped for most of us; the trick there may be to get it to tone down a little. Who knows what will work for you? Here are some things that have worked for me. The first is, tell yourself that everything that you do in the shop is equally valuable and equally important. A good place to start is sweeping the floor. Do it mindfully and well. Take pleasure in it, in seeing the dust swept into neat piles. Sharpen your tools. Do it mindfully and well, to the best of your ability. A day spent in the shop doing nothing but sharpening is a day well spent. Be content with it. A sharp chisel is its own reward, a thing of beauty in its own right. It is an accomplishment. Take all the time you want to admire it. Take a photo, show it with pride to a friend. Reflect on how your father, his father, and his father before him sharpened their chisels.

A second thing that has worked for me is to catch myself when I substitute the word for the thing itself. The word is not the thing. Only the left brain thinks that and the left brain is wrong in this regard. Take a crafted object that you like, such as a Queen Anne leg. The term “Queen Anne leg” is a shorthand, a fast-food-type convenience substituting for the real thing. Look at your leg. Look at several. Follow the contours with your eyes and fingers. Get inside the thing. Look at it from different perspectives. See if you can get to a place where your mind is not spewing out a string of descriptive words about it but instead is simply aware of and appreciating thing as a whole, in its totality. Or try the same thing with a simple board. Just look at it, the grain structure, the variation of color, in minute detail. Imagine yourself as communing with whatever force, process, entity, or God created that board. 

A third trick that has worked for me is to try completing a task that goes way beyond what you think you can do, an impossible dream, if you will. For me, it was building guitars. No way I could possibly ever do that, much too complicated, will take forever and only result in frustration. None of the books lay out the procedures in orderly steps, and so on and so forth. Fortunately I ignored all this mental twaddle and got to work. Here is what one experienced and gifted player wrote after playing my first guitar. I am now working on number 5.

“It was delicate, responsive, and you could feel it breathe next to your body.  It projected sound wonderfully without being harsh or brash and had very even tone throughout all six strings.  The action was sweet, smooth but with clear articulation.  It compares very favorably with a Martin guitar, which is the closest thing on the market that it resembles.  Visually, it is very pleasing.  The decoration is unique and clearly the result of thoughtful and painstaking design.  The overall impression is that of playing a vintage instrument, one that has a full, broken-in sound, and has been lovingly handled and played for decades.”

-Tom Guttmacher

What you have read in this article is my particular perspective. It is by no means complete and my perspective may change over time. But it is a starting point in a personal quest to enhance and reveal the beauty that is already in the wood itself, and in so, doing find some measure of deliverance.

 

The New England Luthiers is an association of professionals and amateurs brought together by a common love of making stringed instruments