Craftsman with a labour of love — rocking chairs

Press, 18 November 1981, Page 17

Craftsman with a labour of love — rocking chairs

By

GARRY ARTHUR

When Maynard MacDonald sees a fine old tree about to come dowm, he immediately calculates how many rocking chairs it would make. He’s a rocking chair nut, and they are never far from his thoughts. Even the smooth, ample-bottomed stools for which he has become well-known he regards as training for the making of rocking chairs. He has studied rockers from all angles, and reckons he knows what makes them rock — the height of the seat above the ground, the rake of the legs, the angle of the rocker in repose. Every rocker he has made has been a little different from the last and the latest one to come out of his Woolston studio-workshop is very different indeed. “I call it a love-seat,” he says. He saw one like it in Nova Scotia. It was stark and simple, almost rude in its colonial matter-of-fact-ness, and it was not a rocker. But Maynard could see the possibilities. It is a seat built for two. “I can see a man and woman sitting there,” says the woodworker, reflectively, “and later just the woman and her child.” The man’s place on the love-seat is turned into a secure cradle by the addition of a little wooden fence half-, way along the front edge. Those who use the seat, mother, father, child — Maynard MacDonald pictures as “a trinity of family life — the harmony of man, woman, and child expressed in something that is beautiful.”

It is undoubtedly a beautiful piece of furniture. The seat itself has been sculpted from a thick slab of mahogany which he had been saving for years for something like this. Legs, rails, and spindles are all of turned mahogany, and the joints are wedged tenons. The slender rockers were first divided into three layers, then laminated together again for strength. Maynard MacDonald started out with a rough idea, but really designed the chair by “feel” as he went

along. While he was designing the arms, he still had no idea what the cradle fence would look like. Hundreds of hours of loving hand and lathe work have gone into the love-seat, which will be his main contribution to the annual exhibition of the Guild of Woodworkers at the C.S.A. Gallery, which opens tomorrow. This is only their second annual exhibition, but mem-

bership has practically doubled in the last year, and the exhibition will be much bigger. All exhibits were chosen by a selection panel and show what a wide variety of woodworking techniques are embraced by the guild. There is modern and traditional furniture, woodturning, toys, carving, sculpture, and marquetry.

Guest exhibitors are the wood sculptor Pat Mulcahy,

and three painters who work in appropriate themes — Liliana MacDonald, Bill Cumming, and Paul Eyles. Maynard MacDonald, who is president of the guild, and about a dozen other members are very active in collecting wood suitable for furniture making, turning and carving. They managed to get 41 logs from the plane trees felled a while ago in Fitzgerald Avenue, and recently they obtained three oak threes from the Cracroft estate in Cashmere. Sometimes they go out and mill a walnut, an oak, or a plane tree on the spot, using a portable chainsaw device that can saw a log into thick planks. “We are looking for more trees,” says their president; “luckily a lot of people are happy to give them to us.” They would often rather see their tree turned into beautiful things that might last another 100 years than have it sawn up for firewood. The woodworkers are grateful even for small pieces, because those can be used by the turners and carvers. “We don’t want to go out and be sawmillers and loggers,” says Maynard MacDonald, “but we have to because we can’t get the type of wood we want in the dimensions we want.” He says some woodworkers are planting trees such as black walnut, even though they know they may not mature in their own lifetime. They do it because they just love wood.