I am an art student.
I harbor my paint brush like a prosthetic limb. I spend my free time roaming the art museum halls of my mind, searching for fallen paint chips of concepts and emotions to inspire some use for my inert extremity.
How much more useless and obsolete it would be if I even considered accommodating a hammer or a saw instead.
The thought had never crossed my mind until the day I found myself following the heavy scent of sawdust and testosterone to a deafening place I now lovingly call my carpentry room.
Yells of “I’m hungry!” and, “Four! No, six… no, seven and a half!” compete with some loudly humming machines (to put it mildly) and concrete withstanding dragged wooden planks. The carpentry uniform seems to be an oversized gray sweatshirt, a baseball cap, day-glo yellow safety goggles, and pants that begin perilously close to the knees. Carpentry students must have been taught the Carpenter’s Swagger on day one: back slightly hunched, neck slumped, arms not quite touching their sides. It comes more naturally to some.
Doors to nowhere float across the room, extra wood sawed off and knobs screwed on as the carpenters see fit. I am shown a Platform, and its amazing ability to withstand the hip gyrations of one particularly lively carpentry student, now dancing atop it.
Then, ceremoniously, I am handed a pair of the much-coveted yellow-tinted goggles and a nail gun, which I stare at dumbly. With more assistance than I would care to admit, I begin to get the hang of the whole Nailing Big, Flat Wood to Long, Skinny Wood thing. Apparently, I am ready to move on to more potentially harmful instruments of tree-torture.
Mr. Cypressi, my sculpture teacher, stands across the hall, his room in a monk-like calm compared to where I’m standing, no doubt introducing freshman to clavicles and phalanges. Recalling the name of each bone and tendon in my phalanges is interestingly unhelpful finding them such a short distance from one of the carpentry room’s Giant Spinning Wheels of Phalange Detachment (or so I’ve dubbed them). The carpenters are sawing away with the GSWoPDs with ease, so I courageously lower mine and watch a piece of wood split in two, realizing just how I adore instant gratification. The amount of time I have just applied to drastically and irreversibly altering this piece of wood would have produced about a square millimeter of crosshatching with my 4B drawing pencil.
In the visual arts, as in all art forms for that matter, you strive for boldness and immediacy; in carpentry, you have no choice. There is no doubt or hesitation in my carpentry room, and as I stand, dazed (in exemplary artiste-fashion) and contemplating how to express that maybe carpentry is the most pure and unobstructed form of artistic expression, one of those doors to nowhere almost hits me in the head and I am brought back into the moment, ducking and trying not to gasp.
Carpentry has this reputation for being, well, not the most sophisticated of occupations. But really, the majority of us (the collective non-carpenters) have forgotten our pure, instinctual desire to create. Most of us cannot even experience the pleasure of breaking a piece of wood in two with a primal grunt. In many ways, carpentry is much closer to the source of art and human expression than any other endeavor. The carpenters (even, or especially, with their pants falling off) are in the moment and feeling it, not reflecting on what slicing a two by four represents metaphorically, not analyzing yesterday’s decisions or agonizing over tomorrow’s prerequisites.
As the carpentry class comes to a close, the ear-splitting hum of the GSWoPDs slows to a stop, and I can’t believe how my arm aches with ghost pains for a saw or a hammer or a nail gun.