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Rustic Shows
Gatherings and
Art Shows
that are rustic friendly
Books
Making Gypsy Willow Furniture by Bim Willow®
(paper back)
Books by
Dan Mack
So You Want to be a Rustic Furniture Maker?
Tips of the Trade by
Bim Willow®
a free E-book
Groups
Twig Furniture Group
Canadian Rustic Furniture Group
Workshops
Do you teach?
Peter Louison
ASSBACKWOODS
A Manifesto for The Rustic Furniture Movement
“Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind in our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact!
Who are we? Where are we?”
--Henry David Thoreau, Ktaadn
Where indeed? It’s been 150 years since Thoreau shouted his question, and humanity is further now from contact with Nature than he could ever have dreamed. Where are we? We live the best part of our days in air-conditioned boxes, toiling in cubicle farms, hunched over keyboards under artificial light. Mighty homo-sapiens, mammoth killer, Ice Age survivor, lean and limber hunter-gatherer, daughter of the Enlightenment, son of sodbusters, children of tireless builders. Look how far we’ve come! Ha! Progress has much to recommend it. But is it really in our nature to distance ourselves from Nature? We say no. “Go back, go back, go back to your woods.”
--J.R. (Robby) Robertson, Storyville
We’d like to suggest a way to go forward. Step back. Even if it’s in some small way in your life. One way to do that—to get back to your woods-- is in the making, collecting and enjoyment of rustic furniture. Consider a simple chair, a crude table or a willow bench. Look at the randomness of the bark, the unique flow of the wood grain. the sinuous, surprising curves. In every nuance is a sense of the world nature made, a world—blessedly unlike your own-- that’s not conforming, not predictable and doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t do, it just is. Rustic furniture may be too humble to call itself art. But it can’t help but live in the realm of art, because there is no greater artist than Nature.
Nature paints the best part of the picture, carves the best of the statue, builds the best part of the house and speaks the best part of the oration.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rustic furniture represents a little bit of liberation. It says that all the lines we live within need not be straight. That 45-degree angles are overdone contrivances. And that there is really no such thing—and no duller notion—than a perfect circle. Lift your tired eyes from your digital world and rest them on a piece made with the 10 digits (or sometimes nine, sadly) of a rustic maker. It’s true: sometimes the best way to go forward is to step back. Do we have it assbackwards? Actually, we like to call it Assbackwoods. --Peter S. Louison, December 2005
