Chair Chat

Chair Chat is a regularly updated feature on my web site. My intention and hope is to share with visitors various aspects of my technique, philosophy and general musings on the craft. I am expanding this page to include some discussion of the works of other fine artists and craftsman.

A la suite de l'Unesco by Jean Arp

The Star by Jean Arp

The "Star" by Jean Arp is positively sublime and one of my favorite pieces. It stands in perfect balance and poise, a beautiful composition of form that is almost weightless.

I very much enjoy the art of Jean Arp including the enigmatic humor of his poems with their "dada" roots.

Kasper is Dead

alas our kasper is dead

who will now carry the burning banner hidden in the pigtail of clouds to play the daily black joke

who will turn the coffee-mill in the primeval barrel

who will now rice the idyllic deer out of the petrified paper box

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Much of his work was relief sculpture including his early collages. When he further developed his style into the "round", strangely the three dimensional pieces retained the quality of relief sculpture. The sensuous surfaces of the sculptures flow and congeal into a composition where surface distinction remains undifferentiated. In this respect the three dimensional pieces remain in the emotional realm.
Compare the star sculpture above with for example the piece by Andreas Kienlin shown below.
Both are three dimensional. Kienlin's incredibly beautiful piece has distinctly differentiated and articulated surfaces. It this sense it goes beyond a form whose character is somehow exclusively emotional to a piece that embodies a further dimension.

Comfortable Dining Chairs

Chair making is a wonderful and rewarding craft. It takes considerable skill and experience to achieve a balance of strength, comfort and beauty in a composite design.
I have made a great many chairs of many different styles and have refined the proportions and dimensions for optimum comfort as well as the structure of the chair for strength and stability with a pleasing form.
My chairs have been called "three hour chairs" designed for comfort so that people can linger long at the dining table after the meal is over. As this sort of entertaining is something my wife and I enjoy very much I have striven to refine the curve of the chair back, the depth and width of the seat for optimum ease and I upholster the seats myself to ensure luxurious comfort.

Comfortable Dining Chairs

Custom made Leather Dining Chairs

Two of my chairs on this site are shown upholstered in leather. The Post Office Chair, made from recycled oak salvaged from the Yreka, CA post office was upholstered in green leather. The leather stretches beautifully over the round front corners of the chair and does not require a seam or a fold.
The other chair is the Tall Back Chair in Walnut. This is a very elegant chair with a 47" tall back. The upholstery is not true leather but a strong micro-fiber with a distressed leather finish. The distressed leather look is perfect for this chair.
Recently, some people came to see my chairs with a view to ordering eight and possibly a dining room table as well. By appointment, we sometimes use our house as a furniture show room where numerous pieces can be seen in the context of our home. We have nine different styles of chair as well as the set of four we use in our own dining room.
The visitors tried all the chairs and became quite excited with the experience. All of them are very comfortable and graceful as well as strongly built. They particularly liked the tall chair with the distressed leather upholstery.
When I attend furniture shows I take several of the chairs along and find that people really enjoy the experience of trying and comparing them.
Our next show is the San Jose Arts Festival on March 12th, 13th and 14th of this year ( 2004). It will take place in the San Jose Convention Center. Our booth is #324-326. See you there!

Tall Back Chair in Walnut (leather upholstery)

The Yreka Post Office Dining Chair

I recently completed a dining table and four chairs for Ray and Julaine Morley in Ashland. One day they dropped by my shop and offered me some oak wood panels that they had found in their parents storage shed. It was obviously very old wood. I asked them to see if they could find out something of the history and this is what they discovered.
I talked with my father this evening and was able to glean a bit of information. My father began work at the post office in Yreka on July 5, 1948 ( my mother joined him about a month later with babe-in-arms, moi. However, it turns out that the post office was in yet another location, though all three have been on Broadway, progressing about a block southward with each move. In 1948 it was the Warren Building (long gone), which is where the oak originally came from. It moved to the second location in 1950. My father acquired the oak in 1961 when the post office moved to its current address. The wood predated my fathers arrival in 1948 and must be at least sixty years old.

Julaine Morley.

When I first saw the wood I did not think I could do anything with it. It was heavily varnished, dirty and had "junk" chalked on it. I offered it to a fellow furniture maker but he didn't want it either. I had it leaning against the wall of my shop for a week or two and then one day I decided to plane it and at least see what it looked like under the old varnish. To my astonishment it was really quite lovely with "tiger-striping" rippling through it. I was making a set of dining chairs at the time and decided to make one more along with the others but out of this oak.
The chair turned out very nicely and I carved a rose in the back for fun. The interesting historical background to the Post Office Chair has attracted considerable interest locally. I have decided to show it at the upcoming Woodcraft Guild Show in Ashland, Oregon on Thanksgiving weekend this year. It will also be featured in the regional newspapers during the same week.

The Post Office Chair

Theater Prop Chairs

I worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon for five years. I worked in theater props. For a performance of King Lear I had to make twenty-four chairs.
The play began with the entire cast wearing formal evening dress and seated on the stage in a long line as the lights went up.
I think twenty of the chairs were used in that opening scene. Some of the characters drift away leaving Lear with his daughters and a couple of courtiers.
Then suddenly King Lear had a fit of temper and starts throwing the chairs about! That is why we made four extra.
Most of the chairs stood up well for the entire run of the show, which I think, was nine months. There were a few small repairs and some refinishing to do along the way.
The seats of the chairs were a dark red velvet. If velvet is rubbed in one direction the pile stands up like human hair and smoothes down if rubbed the other way. For normal use when a chair is upholstered in velvet the pile smoothes down towards the front of the chair. This makes the cloth nice and flat when someone gets up. On the stage it is exactly the opposite. The lighting shows the velvet, as blotchy and irregular if the pile is smooth towards the front. The light is "captured" and does strange things.
For stage props the velvet is upholstered in the opposite direction showing the smooth side towards the audience.

The Lake Tahoe Chair

Comfortable Chairs

I make my hall chairs slightly different from my dining chairs. The dining chairs are supremely comfortable with a gracefully sloping back, carefully calculated seat depth and seat height. My chairs are designed so that someone can sit at the table comfortably for hours.
The hall chairs are designed with less slope in the back so that they can be positioned closer to the wall and the seat depth is also slightly less so that they will not intrude too far into the traffic of the hallway.
In our town of Ashland, Oregon there are many fine restaurants because of the very busy tourist trade lasting throughout the spring, summer and most of the fall. Ashland is home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that has one of the longest runs of all the provincial repertory theater companies in the U.S.A. with plays running from March until October.
My wife and I enjoy eating out from time to time but there are restaurants in this town that I would no longer visit because the dining chairs are so horribly uncomfortable. They are either too hard, the backs slope awkwardly or the seats are too shallow. Such chairs are fine in a quick food cafe but are miserable in an expensive restaurant where you pay for the elegant dining experience.
Any of my chairs can be made to serve either as a hall chair or a dining chair and all of them are comfortable.

The Vanya Arm Chair

My First Set of Chairs

I made my first set of dining room chairs almost thirty years ago. They were the same style but of two different woods. Two of the four were made of koa, a richly colored and beautifully grained Hawaiian wood and the other two were made of black walnut. The black walnut was very black indeed without the golden ripples that are sometimes found running through the wood.
The construction was interesting with solid seats one and a half inches thick and a back one inch thick. It was plank construction. The backs were contoured beautifully and sloped at a graceful angle backward for comfort. The seats were made to notch into a hole in the back and be secured by a stout peg.
Each of the backs had a different carving. I remember the spider's web in one of the walnut chairs, a rose bud carved into one of the koa chairs but what the other two carvings were I have quite forgotten.
Although they were simple chairs they were quite lovely and entirely unique. The clients were delighted with them. The chairs I make now are quite different and technically much more complex to make. Over the years I have refined the designs and after numerous prototypes arrived at a chair design that as an arm chair or tall back chair or even a hall bench combine grace and beauty with elegant lines and sturdiness.

Tall Back Chair in Walnut

Fine Art Chairs

This new web site is about fine dining chairs and the art of chair making. Beautiful lines, richly ornate and figured woods and unashamed comfort all combine in a practical and sturdily built piece of furniture.
My chairs and benches are modern day heirlooms in the making, combining strict attention to ergonomics, visual pleasure and fine woodcraft.
As a fine art, chair making requires attention to every detail so that each part of the chair enhances the entire composition.
I have made a great many chairs and find the experience satisfying and enjoyable in every respect, always striving towards a greater expression of fine art as well as comfort and durability.
These pages show some of the chairs I make and each can be custom adapted to suit the decor and the style of your existing furniture and the interior of your home.

For Dining Tables and other fine furniture please visit my main web site: www.FineArtFurniture.com

Julian Hamer