Full Stop or Period

Mainly, we use the full stop as the tiny dot finalising a statement, often with the closing emphasis that there is nothing more to be said on a matter. I designed the turned work as parts for two cabinets made for the Cabinet Room of the White House and kept three (only a part of one of them) as mementoes of the great work: one was an ebony peg that supported the inside shelves, another the square end off one of the turned mesquite columns, and the last but far from least, the perhaps more prized object of all, was a turned ebony and oak doorknob that’s been rolling around in one of my small drawers where I keep tools less used and that don’t fit elsewhere in the day to day of life. I didn’t turn these pieces, a friend did the columns and knobs and one of my sons turned the ebony pegs for supporting the shelves. Seemingly insignificant at the time, these items have come to mean more as the years have passed. They are more the mementoes of a highly significant work accomplished by a handful of skilled woodworkers.

Sometimes, perhaps more often than I care to say, we design things, write things and make things that, well, just get, hmm, is pilfered the word I’m looking for or does that diminish the reality of straight-out thievery? In my life making and teaching, training others and apprenticing, things crop up that some would cry out, “Stop! Thief!” One time back in the late 80s, early 90s a friend and employee apprentice sold my work on my one day off each week and kept a large percentage of the money that should have gone into the till when cash was about the only collateral of the day alongside cheques with ID and before debit cards became just about the only way as in today’s transacting. I confronted the man who refused to give back the stolen money and probably couldn’t because it was so much and he’d spent it all. Needless to say, he lost his job because of his stubborn refusal to see even the wrong he had done. It was a sad day because his wife and family were the ones that suffered knowing he’d done it. The basis for any relationship is honesty, surely?

It’s not unusual for someone working with you or for you to go it alone once you’ve trained them. Actually, the ultimate goal is for them to do just that. That was what journeymanship was all about. An apprentice comes to the end of his or her apprenticeship and enters a period when they begin a journey to another maker to expand their knowledge by accessing a place where they can learn from another master until they themselves become a master in their own right. In this case, the apprentice made copies, templates and drawings of my designs and then made and sold them himself for several years. I frequently see my ideas, thoughts and even my videos pirated for the benefit of some charlatan who does little more than copy and paste. From mortise guides to dovetail templates, what was freely given becomes another’s commercial enterprise, individuals who do nothing more than, well, there’s no other word, just steal.

In seeing the doorknob rolling gently around the drawer amongst my other bits and bobs, my mind went back to an unpleasant point a month or two after delivering the White House designs to Washington DC and personally placing them in the West Wing and the Cabinet Room. I was later accused by a fellow maker that my design was not my original and that I had copied it from an existing piece. This led to something of a tribunal where I proved irrefutably that the designs were original and that they were indeed completely mine. Of course, I didn’t copy a single element of the unique designs sitting on either side of the Cabinet Room doors leading to the Oval Office. To say the accusation was anything less than excruciatingly painful would be to understate the reality. and especially so when it came from a man who’d until then been my friend. Thankfully, my detailing my designs in notebooks and with drawings and sketches meant that he was unable to produce anything that substantiated his accusing me and I was readily able to prove design originality from the drawings I’d made and signed off on in my personal journal. But the enquiry took weeks and led into two months before the whole truth was established. It utterly drained me of energy through lack of sleep and the anxiety it caused because I had entrusted the accuser with some of my original drawing concepts to make copies from and which were never returned to me. Ultimately they became lost in the endeavour. More than that though, the initial joy I had was, well, stolen from me. Thankfully, I had made copies of the drawings myself and was able to clearly prove everything. Sadly, my accuser never had the integrity to apologise for his failure and never sought to put things right. I never saw him again and we parted losing the friendship we had once enjoyed even though I was and have always been accessible for reconciliation.

It’s the small things that close off designs. The ‘period‘ is the US English version of our English ‘full stop‘. The full stop, period, or full point is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, but often it marks the closure of a declarative sentence. It’s a sentence-ending that defines in the strictest sense that full stop that seems always to defy further thought and speech. Yes, of course, the accusation sullied my work for a period and my recovery came not from the conclusion of two very beautiful pieces of art so much as the remembered associations working with two of my own sons and then the other men who came to me as teenagers I’d trained through two decades and who became the highly skilled craftsmen I worked alongside for most of my US life. It took two months with eight men to close off the inquiry. Concluding that concluded my 23 years of living and working in the USA. This accusation contributed to me deciding on closing my life living and working in the US and amongst my beloved Texans. This represented half of my then-working life as a furniture designer and maker. I decided my return to my native country was needed to begin the next chapter of my life. Sometimes, often, you have to see what something is not to see what something is. The full stop says let’s stop there and write the next story, but this time let’s make it real.

The work I had for two decades prefaced my new work. Where I thought things were over I began to see that what had happened in the US was to undergird a new work. In some ways, YouTube at that time was still very much a baby. In 2009, it was exactly four years since its launch but growing fast. On a local US level, I established myself as something of a pioneer transitioning from furniture making to teaching and writing, yet I had not realised how much the teaching of thousands of students was actually equipping me to teach and train woodworkers beyond the US. But whereas the demands of running the school meant my being restricted to the US geographically, it was the work I achieved there that equipped me to deliver a training package as the internet opened up for training worldwide. Again, seeing what something was not showed me what was. My work has continued to grow despite the dishonesties I have had to face.

Looking at the simple appearance of the doorknob and thinking then of those three items reminded me that life is indeed punctuated by stops and starts that make sense of the otherwise insane. The doorknob might seem simple enough, but there are hidden complexities to its design that show, just as with life, not everything is as it appears to be. Full stops make sense of sentences and then too so does a lived life as a simple maker. I say this to add the same emphasis a full stop adds to quell confusion throughout that paragraph that many now write to declare freedom from laws. We can of course fill in the blanks from someone refusing to punctuate, use caps or whatever. Sometimes we do have to bin them.

Just as it is a non-negotiable for honest people to walk into a shop and steal from the storeowners, so too should it be with stealing the designs of a maker be that through pirating his videos, his ideas and patterns, dovetail templates and his mortise guides and so on for commercial gain. What I gave freely became a moneyspinner for others and nothing more. Seeing the doorknob as I do most days made me think about things stolen from the spirit of its maker and designer. We can and should be inspired by the work of others and indeed we should aspire to inspire others in their growth as makers. There is good reason to take what’s seen and use it as a springboard for something better. I didn’t invent the flyswat, but I did design mine and I own that design. The handle length and shaped attack zone are pretty much standard, but the style, the use of leather the way it is, the stitching and so on are indeed mine: I own the design and the intellectual property. Many exhibitions ban photography and for good reason and that is because no one can prove intent when it’s inside the head of a visitor. A good exhibitor protects the rights and works of the artist. Someone stealing from you leaves a nasty taste in your mouth no matter how beneficent a body tries to be.