Spring 2011 - Torii Gates

Our friend Julianne McGuinness, Executive director of the Alaska Botanical Garden, asked me to submit something for the annual ABG Gala, their big fundraiser.  These two creations are the result.  Traditional Chinese and Japanese design has had a pretty big influence on the early 20th century American furniture styles that inform a lot of my work, and this was a chance to explore the unique form of a Torii gate, an icon of Japanese temple architecture.  When installed at a temple entrance they serve to mark the trasition from the profane to the sacred.  The exact meaning, origin, and derviation of the Torii gate design is apparently lost to history, but they are quite evocative regardless.

I chose to hang two traditional symbols from the gates, pierced relief carved into large disks.  The one in the first two pics is Japanese lettering for "tranquility", or so the internet says.  I know no Japanese so I'll have to assume it is correct.  Even if it's not, I still love the lines.  The second is a pretty obvious one, yin and yang, or positive and negative.  The gates are made of western red cedar that I bought at the local chain big-box harware stores and machined as needed.  The disks were shaped using a system I dreamed up that amounts to a (really) poor man's lathe in which I punded a nail through a board, clamped that board to a work bench with the nail sticking straight up, drilled a hole in the exact center of the cedar disk and used my Granddad's massive disk sander to both spin the disk on the nail and remove material, pushing my leg into the piece as a brake if it got going too fast.  To my utter astonishment, it actually works pretty well.

It was great fun attending the gala as a "featured artist" (whoda ever thunk it), and I actually made my first sale in the history of my hobby, to a lovely couple in East Anchorage, for $1900!  Honestly, given the hours I put into these things, that amounts to chump change if I were paying myself an hourly wage, but then I never got into this as a way to get rich.  There are lots of guys out there with a lot more talent and skill than I have who barely make ends meet trying to do this a profession.  Kind of too bad, but that's the way it is.  Anyway, in this case it's all immaterial anyway since I donated all the proceeds to the gardens.  As I am fond of mentioning, I just like to build stuff....