Andy Jack Kent, Connecticut
A gifted 2008 graduate of Purchase College, State University of New York, with a BFA in sculpture, Andy Jack is the latest addition to the GreenWood team of mentors. Andy recently concluded his first one-month training session in the Peruvian Amazon, where he supervised a group of 20 indigenous Yanesha artisans in six remote villages. Andy helped install new workbenches, foot-powered lathes and sharpening systems, and generally contributed to the overall improvement of his students’ sharpening skills, quality control and workshop infrastructure.
Andy has apprenticed to Curtis Buchanan in Windsor chairmaking and has worked closely with Pete Galbert and Don Weber. He had this to say about his first workshop:
“My level of satisfaction increased significantly with every successful communication. I like to teach, to pass on what I’ve learned. To teach it to someone from a different culture was the ultimate rush.”
Brian Boggs Asheville, North Carolina
Brian Boggs makes beautiful handmade chairs that are not only a work of art, they’re comfortable and built to last a lifetime. He designs and builds each chair by hand, using a process of steaming and bending each part of the back, legs and arms to a graceful and extremely comfortable curve. More than that, Brian thinks deeply about technology, tools and the human-scale machinery that can best accomplish his complementary goals of comfort, quality, functional aesthetics and efficiency. He has redesigned and manufactured numerous ancient tools—from the spokeshave to the shaving horse—and he is a widely acknowledged contemporary master of traditional woven bark seating.
Brian is a founding board member and an original GreenWood artisan mentor, who has been training artisans in Honduras and Peru since 1993.
VISIT BRIAN’S WORK at: www.brianboggschairs.com
Curtis Buchanan Jonesborough, Tennessee
Curtis Buchanan has been making Windsor chairs for more than 20 years in historic Jonesborough, Tennessee, and examples of his work may be found at Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello, Virginia. The Windsor style has been around for almost 300 years. Its classic lines gracefully framing negative space have led some to refer to the form as utilitarian sculpture.
At home in the diverse Southern Appalachian forest, Curtis enjoys access to a variety of high quality hardwood logs, which he splits by hand, using wedges and a sledge hammer, and the parts are shaped at the lathe and using a drawknife at the shaving horse. These traditional green-wood techniques—as opposed to sawing dry lumber—ensure straight wood fibers and uncompromising strength. The use of green (unseasoned) wood also enables Curtis to selectively dry parts after they are made. Super-dry tenons fit into mortises bored in relatively wetter, air-dried wood. After assembly, the tenons swell and the mortises shrink, creating stronger, tighter joints.
Employing these same traditional techniques in the field that he uses in his own shop, Curtis has been training artisans in Honduras and Peru since 1993, and he teaches chairmaking workshops across the United States. Curtis and his father operate the nation’s first certified organic Christmas tree farm in nearby North Carolina. He is a founding board member and an original GreenWood artisan mentor.
VISIT CURTIS’S WORK at: www.curtisbuchananchairmaker.com
John Curtis Felipe Carrillo Puerto, México
John Curtis is a self-described "serial ruminator" about sustainable forest management and reduced-impact logging. A former commercial fisherman, metal fabricator, salvage logger, feller, supplier of wood products for niche markets, and partner in the Luthier's Mercantile, a California importer and purveyor of guitar parts, John has worked in most sectors of the wood-products industry, from timber harvesting and sawmilling to container import and export and the marketing of processed parts. John is currently assisting forest communities in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico to develop dimensioned wood products that meet the standards of local, national and international markets. His life-long fascination with wood has resulted in a hands-on familiarity with most of the links in the "value chain," from the standing tree to the final invoice. John is a founding member of the Woodworkers Alliance for Rainforest Protection (WARP) and a GreenWood board member. He provides frequent consulting expertise to GreenWood on a wide range of wood processing subjects.
Don Weber Paint Lick, Kentucky
Don Weber has been working wood for nearly 40 years, having started out under his father’s feet in his native village in Wales. Don apprenticed to a family member in a joiner's shop when he was 16 years old and has been involved with woodworking ever since.
In 1979 Don began to research the old ways of turning wood on a human-powered, spring-pole lathe. He tracked down some of the last surviving “bodgers”—the old-time woodland turners who produced turned parts for the chair industry around High Wycombe, England—and the pole lathe is now a staple in his tool repertoire. Don is a member of the Society of Workers in Early Arts & Trades and the Association of Pole Lathe Turners. He builds English- and Welsh-style Windsor chairs, restores furniture and teaches green woodworking in the British tradition, as well as blacksmithing and toolmaking.
VISIT DON’S WORK at: www.handcraftwoodworks.com
Wade Smith North Franklin, Connecticut
Wade Smith grew up in Vermont, where he was exposed to a number of different boats. But he took the first real step on his path to becoming a boatbuilder when, at age eleven, his father gave him a dilapidated Thompson runabout. A few years later, the boat went to the dump—surely many careers are launched by guilt. After earning a degree in electronics and working two years in a circuit-board factory, he enrolled in The Apprenticeshop of Nobleboro and Rockland, Maine, so that he might be a little better at his hobby. Just before graduation, Wade learned of a job opening in the John Gardner Boat Shop at the Mystic Seaport museum in Connecticut. Two years later, he was made supervisor—with responsibilities for research, documentation and the construction of historic vessel reproductions at the Seaport, as well as running boat-shop courses and the John Gardner Small Craft Workshop.
In the summer of 2003 GreenWood recruited Wade to teach two boatbuilding workshops in Copén, Honduras. Two pipantes (square-end, flat-bottom cargo boats) were built during the first workshop, and the following year three cayucos (pointy-bow, fishing boats) were completed.
In 2007 Wade went to work at Taylor and Snediker Woodworking in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, where he is charged with contract projects for the restoration and production of wooden boats. Wade Smith lives in North Franklin, Connecticut, with his patient wife, two dogs, two cats and a multitude of boats and Land Rovers in various states of disrepair.
David Snediker Pawcatuck, Connecticut
David Snediker began his involvement with wooden boats aboard a collection of his dad’s leaky old boats on Great South Bay, Long Island. This interest led him to John Gardener’s boatbuilding classes at Mystic Seaport. An interest in historic preservation and boatbuilding led to several years as a shipwright at Mystic Seaport’s H.B. Dupont Preservation Shipyard. In 1988 he and partner Bill Taylor established Taylor and Snediker LLC, a boatbuilding and restoration workshop specializing in traditional boat building and wooden yacht restoration, now located in Pawcatuck, Connecticut. David linked GreenWood to Mystic Seaport and organized the production of ship’s knees from Honduras for the museum’s reproduction of the Schooner Amistad in 1999. He was likewise instrumental in planning two boatbuilding workshops that GreenWood conducted in the buffer zone of the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras. David holds a BA in anthropology from Connecticut College and resides in Mystic, Connecticut. VISIT DAVE'S BUSINESS at: www.lvjwinchesusa.com
Gene Inman Healdsburg, California
Gene Inman is a native of Sonoma County, in the redwood country of Northern California. As a youth, he worked with his father and grandfather in the family sawmill, cutting redwood and fir logs up to five feet in diameter. Later, he helped out in his father's quarry. Gene has held a wide range of jobs in the wood industry. Among these are: machinery set-up at a finishing mill, converting rough stock into paneling and floors; a roof-truss and joist-manufacturing plant; and a laminated-beam plant, where he operated the "Cyclops" planer to surface beams up to 60 inches wide and over 100 feet long. He has operated re-saws and worked in kiln-drying operations. Over the last 15 years, Gene has mainly operated his WoodMizer bandmill, and he periodically helps build redwood water tanks up to 100,000-gallon capacity.
For fun, Gene packs a mule and scours the mountains of Sonoma County in search of game. He's a famously good cook and is well-known for his salads made from wild plants. Gene's vegetable garden is legendary.
