Marcus Sly : Cabinetmaker

Since during the last couple of days I've been hand finishing an oak cabinet, It's perhaps not unnatural that my thoughts have turned to the art of wood finishing!  In particular I've been thinking about polished finishes.  William Morris and the Arts and Crafts pioneers were against such finishes as a matter of principle.  They felt that the repetitive work involved was undignified for the craftsperson, and was a factor in the division of labour in manufacturing.   They felt this was damaging to the quality of manufactured items and the life of those who produced them.

I tend to at least partly agree with David Pye¹ that this argument is fallacious.  There is nothing undignified about the skill and labour required to produce such finishes - or necessarily about division of labour for that matter.  I also enjoy the look and feel of finely polished things when I come across them.  However I don't tend to use these finishes myself.  There are two main reasons for this. 

Firstly I find a more tactile feel which has something in common with wood in its natural state is equally pleasing, and is perhaps more valuable in an age when shininess can be produced very cheaply - and is applied to so many manufactured products as a matter of course. 

The second reason is a bit more subtle:  Fine finishes usually require that the individual pieces of wood are polished before the piece is assembled and glued together.  This is often the best way to go about things anyway.  However to not allow for the possibility of doing things differently subtly affects the design process.  Certain approaches to shaping and assembly are not possible if the pieces cannot be finished in situ.  As it happens these are just the sort of exploratory, delicately imprecise ways of working which perhaps have more in common with boatbuilding or joinery than traditional cabinet making, and which I find most interesting....

¹David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship,Herbert Press, 2007