My Creative Workspace VII

The workshop is almost back in order after the woodworking demonstrations in London and it’s nice to reenter my home Creative Workspace again. Here my tools and equipment rest and wait to work again it’s true, but more important to me is my creative workspace because here with my tools I can move freely within its limits and work.

A sphere of creative work always exists for the craftsman and craftswoman. Here they pursue the day’s work without hesitation and welcome the challenges that prove skill, resoluteness  and firmness of purpose.  They dispense the easy work first to tackle the challenge and the unknown of the design. Self discipline keeps to task the hand no matter the adverse wood and awkward tool. The chisel splits, the plane shaves and the wood yields to the cutting edge. By this connectedness the creative sphere of work continues day by day as a continuum between the decades, between the man and the wood, the raw and the refined. As surely as form follows function so too a man’s life form the function of his craft.

Home garages and school workshops, workplaces and disused barns and sheds can hold a sphere of creativity to become a personal creative workspace and my goal is to help others reconcile that part of life yet unresolved. Get out in the shed and work out what space you have to work in. Gather in your child and children, grandchildren too and make a spoon from pine, an oak staff or cane. Create with your hands a box of wood and sharpen the edge of your spokeshave and plane as you go. Remember that our hands are both to provide our own needs and the needs of others.