The other day as I was working on a base for my sharpening stones I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I had made one prototype and begun on the second version.
Have you ever had the feeling that something wasn’t quite right, but you couldn’t put your finger on exactly what?
Hardly anything I make ever seems “right” to me.
When I make something I'm not aiming for a particular look. It’s more like I’m trying to elicit a certain feeling out of myself.
The feeling goes, all in one sweep, is that the item is complete, there are no improvements that can be made, it's simple as possible. AFAIK there’s no word that encompasses this feeling of completeness. Everything that detracts from this singular characteristic gives me a sense of anxiety and unease and eventually I can no longer stand to look at the item.
My sense is that good design is deterministic. There may be a million ways to make a table, but at the end of the day most of our tables have four legs and a top. In some ways woodworking is like writing a essay. You begin with an idea and through inquiry and deliberation you arrive at the proper conclusion. You “assay” the idea and in the ideal scenario the result is nothing more than the inevitable consequence of facts and principles. You take the idea in hand and it arrives by itself at its foregone conclusion.
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