Volunteer Woodworker

(bright music) (graphic whooshing) - Welcome to "The Volunteer Woodworker."

I'm your host Charles Brock.

Come with me as we drive the back roads, bringing you the story of America's finest woodworkers.

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) We're going to Kingston Springs, Tennessee, to meet Craig Nutt.

He's an artist of the garden variety.

His wooden chairs, tables, sculpture, unbelievably feature corn, butter beans, and other vegetables as legs, stretchers, backrests, and even airplane parts.

To say his work has a sense of humor is an understatement.

Let's meet Craig Nutt.

(graphic whooshes) - [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by: Since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial-grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC applications.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Co. makes VOC-free, non-toxic milk paint available in 56 colors.

Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

(upbeat music) Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens - Hey, Charles.

- Craig, Craig Nutt, I just love your studio.

You got a beautiful gallery here with a collection of some of your gorgeous work.

It's not the garden variety kind of work, but it is just something that is very natural.

You do things differently.

- Well, people tell me that.

I feel like I do things that come natural to me.

- Yeah, well, where did that come from?

- Well, the vegetable pieces are, you know, ever since I started working with wood and working with furniture specifically, I started growing a garden.

I started out with furniture, working in an antique shop doing furniture restoration.

And the man that I worked for was a big gardener and had some land out in the country outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

And so he gave us a little plot of land to work and so we started growing vegetables and, you know, I think what happened when I quit doing that work and set out on my own, we kind of lost our place to garden.

We lived in town in a shady area in town and I couldn't really garden.

So, I started making my vegetables.

(Charles laughs) You know, you get the seed catalogs and you kind of fantasize about what you're missing.

And so they got bigger and bigger.

And I think, and, you know, seed catalogs always promise each year, you know, bigger, better, improved vegetables.

So, there was something that I thought really got into the American psyche about that.

You know, like at the country fair, people have their competitions to grow bigger vegetables.

You know, they get very woody as they get larger.

Some of them probably about as edible as mine.

But I think there's something about the kind of American psyche that likes big vegetables or more colorful or, you know, next year, they're new colors.

- Oh, I mean, we're sitting in butter bean chairs, and behind us here, we have looks like the "Corncorde," is that what that is?

- The "Corncorde" at the Atlanta Airport.

- Wow.

Now, that is bigger and better.

- That is.

That's kind of about the size that I always picture making these smaller pieces.

You know, I would pair those with kind of things like silos or architectural features to kind of give the impression of size.

But I also realize that people can't put a 10-foot-long vegetable in their home.

Most people can't.

But when the job for the airport came around, that was just before the Olympic Games in 1996, there was a competition to submit slides for public art in the airport and so my work made the cut and I got to do that piece.

And it's still there.

It's still... - How big is that?

- That's 10-feet long and has a 10-foot shuck span.

- Shuck span.

That is truly Craig Nutt.

It is.

Now, what do you call this whirligig piece of carrot here?

- Well, that's one of a group of flying vegetables that I did.

They actually preceded the furniture pieces that I made.

I got interested in historical weathervanes and whirligigs and it just seemed natural to start doing vegetables.

And then this piece during the 1988 presidential election, first President Bush, then Vice President Bush came on the radio one day when I was working in the studio and he said, "I will never use food as a weapon."

And then I thought, "Oh, right."

I was a little cynical about that.

But then I made a series of vegetable bombs.

This is called, "We Will Never Use Food As A Weapon: Carrot Bomb."

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, during, you know, the peak of the space age, you know, when they were testing the Saturn rockets for the moon launch.

And that was, there was also that interplay between military and civilian use of space and rockets and things going on there.

So, that was basically, you know, growing up in that environment, it's sort of natural for rockets and things like bombs and things like that to kind of come into your work.

- Oh, yes.

And did your parents nurture this artistic expression that you undoubtedly had?

- Well, I hadn't really thought about that too much, but I realized my father played piano and everybody on my mother's side of the family played instruments and then my mother would really encourage creativity in the kids.

We had walls that we were allowed to draw on and make notes or whoever wanted some notes about what you were reading or, you know, if you wanted to draw on it.

So, I've pretty much always done that in the studio.

I have a place that I can jot down ideas when they occur to me.

So, I can thank my mother for that.

- So, you kind of gravitated, from what I understand, into music.

- Well, yeah, you know, I played in rock and roll bands as a kid, you know, and- - You started a garage band.

- Garage bands, you know, typical stuff.

But when I was in college, there were a number of artists that hung out together that kind of didn't fit in on campus very well and kinda we created our own scene and we started experimenting with freely improvised music, just making it up as we went along.

One of the people in the group found out that you could check out instruments from the University of Alabama marching band, a million-dollar band, for a $5 deposit.

So, we started checking out instruments that none of us knew how to play and just started experimenting with those and eventually started making records and performing, putting shows together and performing in the university homecoming parade, putting parade entries together.

That was all very influential, especially the free improvisation, because when I started making furniture, you know, I started out really making antique reproductions and that sort of thing.

- That's how you learn how furniture is put together.

- Right, I got fascinated by, you know, taking apart old pieces of furniture and seeing how they were made, wondered how they actually made that.

They didn't have machines.

And I found that the trick was hand tools.

But then when I started designing my own furniture, that more improvisational vent that I was in with my artwork in college and just after college, you know, those kind of took place in a parallel universe too.

So, you know, I'd be playing this free improvised music at night, and in the daytime, I would be making kind of classic period-style furniture.

But eventually, I- - That didn't really fit together.

- Well, you know, and it probably couldn't until I gained enough facility with making furniture that the technique became unimportant and that I could pretty much make whatever I wanted to.

I had the chops to make whatever I wanted to.

And then I started making pieces and that, so, I was able to get a lot more free about what I made.

- Yeah, if you can visualize a piece, but if you can't make it, then it could be a plus in that you've gotta grow into being able to make it or it could just scare you off.

You know, "I can't do this."

Which road do you think you took?

- Well, it was a little of both.

I guess the, you know, when I started out, you know, I'd picture a table, you know, like Western furniture, typically a table is four legs joined with an apron or maybe with a drawer in it.

And, you know, I started thinking of different ways that it could be done.

And really a breakthrough for me was seeing the Treasures of Tutankhamun when it circulated around the US and to see Egyptian New Kingdom furniture, and it was not made that way at all.

It was made in a very naturalistic way, like this desk that's to the right of us, this Deinonychus Desk.

It was really played off of the way some of the furniture in that show was constructed.

You know, they used an animal form and it wasn't like a four ball and claw feet symmetrically arranged.

The pieces looked like they could walk across the room.

And so that really kind of opened up some doors for me to think about, "Well, there's a lot of ways this furniture can be put together."

And so that kind of freed me from kind of assumptions I had made about the construction of pieces of furniture.

- So many of your pieces make a statement or they tell a story and so I guess they were inspired, that's how they were inspired.

And so are you kind of a what-if guy?

- Well, yeah, I guess so.

I think most of the pieces will start with a seed of an idea.

Like this desk again, I thought, well, you know, ball and claw feet, what are those?

You know, they've been, or, you know, it comes from a dragon, the Chinese dragon.

And where did that come from?

Well, surely they've been digging these bones up for ages and ages.

But it's only been very recently that we have a really good idea of what these animals look like and how they lived, how they functioned.

So, to kind of take some of the new finds in paleontology and apply that to a ball and claw foot to, you know, make a piece that is kind of, connects in some way with what we know about paleontology now.

And so that's like a seed, but then in the process of designing it and making models and making the piece, then that idea gets embellished along the way.

- With all your interests, have you ever been bored?

- No.

(chuckles) I can't say that I have, no.

There's so many things out there, so many interesting things and so much, you know, in science and art and the work of other people.

You know, there's no reason to be bored.

- That's right.

You can just look around in here and see your interests from literature to art.

And this is like everything coming together that you have studied, that you have been interested in.

- Well, you know, I think, you know, the world is a magical place if you have eyes to look around you, and it's easy to forget that with all the things that happen in the world that kind of consume your time and consume your brain, you know, turn on the TV and see what, or the news, and see what's going on.

And it's easy to lose sight of just the wonder that's around you.

And I think that's what I really appreciate when I see another artist's work that reminds me of that and makes me stop and say, "Oh, yeah, we're living in an enchanted world here."

It's just you walk around, I look at my garden, it's unbelievable, the plants, the fruit on them, the colors.

You know, you could just never imagine the color combinations that you see in nature.

It's just astonishing.

This bench, it's called "Burning" and it's a, I made that right after 9/11.

And so there were like flames in the air, I think.

And I thought, I had decided I wasn't gonna make any more vegetable pieces, but I had bought this fabric that's on the seat at an auction and it was made by a, it's handwoven chenille that's been discharge dyed.

This color's been stripped out of parts of it and redyed.

It was made by Janet Taylor, who is a North Carolina artist.

And it was at a Furniture Society auction and I thought, "These are the right colors and the right feel for one of my pieces."

Nashville Metro Arts Commission was commissioning five pieces to commemorate the response to the flood in each of those, it was the 2010 flood.

This one is in Bellevue and it's on a high piece of ground in Nashville that the area all around it was flooded, a river plantation, and the Harpeth River flooded.

And this piece actually is, I looked at flood maps and the shape of it was determined by the flood zone.

So, the part on the top that is kind of mud colored.

- Like for my chair-making friends, I love the idea of your famous piece over here.

- "Make a Tree from a Chair."

Yeah, you know, there's a well-known book that anybody who has tried to bust a chair out of a tree knows about, "Make a Chair From a Tree."

And I started thinking about what was gonna happen with my work.

You know, how could it be recycled?

I wasn't quite ready to cut up my own work and recycle it yet, but I went down to the thrift store and bought a chair and I thought, "Well, how good a tree could I make from a chair?"

So, I took it all, knocked it all apart and tried to put it back together as close to a tree as I could make from a chair, carved bark on it, put it on the lathe and turned it around and carved bark.

And that's about as close as I could get.

- Craig, I understand you have a special process for developing these pieces from your seed.

- Well, I don't know if it, I don't know if it's that special a process, but I can tell you how I do it.

You know, I used to get on a drawing board, you know, which was a rectangular drawing board with a sliding rule and draw things up to scale.

And what I found was when I worked entirely on a drawing like that, things tended to be very rectilinear.

You know, it's like I couldn't get off of that and into three-dimensional space.

My solutions to problems tended to be more linear.

And a breakthrough for me was when I started making models of my work.

So, once I get the ideas down, I'll draw parts of them to get them to scale to make patterns, but then I'll go as soon as I can to a model where I actually have a three-dimensional thing.

And I'll pull out a model and we can take it down to the shop and I'll show you some of the advantages of working with a model.

- That's perfect.

I can't wait to see.

- Okay.

- Let's do it.

You've got a nice collection of models here.

- Well, I brought some out that might connect with some of the things we've been talking about.

When I make these models, I just kind of make rough models and try not to spend too much time on them, but make them good enough that I can photograph them and work back over the photographs.

I mean, this is unusual for me to use one and actually paint it.

But you can see this is a model for the "Corncorde" and I actually used an ear of corn on that to represent that rather than carving all of those kernels.

- It looks so real.

I had that question.

Okay.

- But one of the things you can do with a model is if something is not working out, if you don't like the way it looks, well, I was gonna just pull this off.

Say if I didn't like the stretcher on this, it's just stuck on with hot melt glue so I can pull it off, make another one, and try that rather than going through the whole process on a full-size piece.

So, they're just made barely good enough to hold together with hot melt glue.

This is that- - Is there a particular scale that you?

- I usually work with either 1/8 or 1/4 size.

So, I use an architect's scale and then just use it, instead of inches to feet, I'll use the 1/4 scale or 1/8 scale and then use those as inches.

So, that was the model for the butter bean chair.

And this was actually the model for the "Burning" bench.

And as you can see here, I didn't go to all the trouble on the back to carve all that.

I actually, probably when I made the model, I wasn't sure what I was gonna do with the back, so I just put a piece in here to represent that.

And then when I actually started working on the piece, I photographed this.

Let's see, about like that.

Then I printed it and worked back over the print with colors.

And then I could try different things on the drawing.

It would still represent what I was gonna make.

But I think I have a version with just a plain beam there and a version with the flames on it.

And that's probably where I came up with the idea of turning the asparagus stalks into torches.

- Just wonderful.

And it's so efficient as compared to building a full-size piece, trading out pieces, having to do all the joinery perfectly.

- In this stage, in the modeling, I can be pretty spontaneous and things don't have to actually work out on the model and I can play around with the colors.

Like this cabinet here, which is a pepper cabinet.

- It is a pepper.

- This ended up being a banana pepper cabinet, but when I was doing these, I also tried it with a red pepper and I could even make the pepper into an okra.

So, I kind of worked through all those ideas as well.

But, you know, in my color stains.

- Leave no vegetable untried.

Like your tables, your rhubarb tables.

- Well, as I said, you know, we go out in the garden, I've thought, "I've made my last vegetable piece," and then I go out in the garden and I think, "Oh, man, this is just so wonderful.

I need to make a piece out of this."

- Well, you've got a beautiful garden, Craig, this has been fascinating.

- Well, I enjoyed talking with you, Charles.

- Yeah, wonderful visit, wonderful artist.

It makes me smile.

(graphic whooshes) I'm gonna be heading down the road to find a story of another great woodworker.

See you next time on "The Volunteer Woodworker."

(graphic whooshes) (bright music) (bright music continues) - [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by: Since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial-grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC applications.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Co. makes VOC-free, non-toxic milk paint available in 56 colors.

Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

(upbeat music) Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin on wood decorative arts.

Visit charlesbrockchairmaker.com for all you need to know about woodworking.

If you'd like to learn even more, free classes in a variety of subjects are available for streaming from charlesbrockchairmaker.com.

(bright music) (bright music)