It’s a commission for the Yale math department and it’s going to hang in the central space there, to be gazed upon by the great minds of today and tomorrow. I’m busting with joy.

So, in keeping with my mission of disseminating the beauty that I find in math, I’m going to talk a little about how the commission came to be, some of the fascinating math behind it and wtf is a loxodromy anyway.

Origins

This project started this spring when I went on a carving bender inspired largely by a math textbook I’d been reading. The book is about the complex numbers and the incredible things that arise from their geometrical interpretation. Once the inspiration came together, I went on a totally tear.

I was frantically preparing for a show and the final panel that I did was a version of the one above. It was the culmination of the ideas that I was working through and with 20+ hours on the CNC (carving machine), the schedule was tight. So tight, in fact, that I rushed through some of the finer details of the branches of the logarithm and ended up with a slight, but distinct, seam running between the two fixed points (the centers of the spirals).

I didn’t notice this until half-way through the 20 hour cut, at which point it was just too late. But the show must go on, so I cleaned it up, put some oil on, and packed it up for the weekend.

Show Time

At the show, I hung all the new panels with the loxodromic double swirl front and center. And I waited. The first day was slow, but craft shows always are for me. I’m just out there waiting for the one perfect customer, not selling dozens of cutting boards.

On the second day, my patience paid off. I was approached by a beared, backpacked and bespectacled man who was looking at the pieces in a way that most show-goers do not.

He asked “what’s going on here?”

I started in with my normal spiel about how i generate the math on a computer and cut things on a CNC machine, never knowing how much my customers might know about these topics.

He interrupted me with “I’m a mathematician” and it was on!

As it turns out, the man with the backpack was Yair Minsky, a math professor at Yale and whose research is very much in the direction of the complex plane transformation I was presenting. And even more serendipitously, he’s been on a side quest to deck out the math department’s decor with mathematically and aesthetically beautiful works. What kismet!

I explained it was a Möbius transformation and he immediately pointed out that it’s a loxodromic Möbius transformation and we quickly dove right in. Because I’m insufferably self-critical, I had to explain that there was a seam in the work that was an artifact of the computations I used to generate the surface. Specifically, the branches of the logarithm don’t line up there and while I had a good intuition for what was going on, I hadn’t worked through the algebra to get it right.

In the following weeks, we went back and forth about a piece for the school. We agreed that there was something interesting about the seam and the way it belies the computational process of the making, but ultimately it felt like the piece for the math department should be “correct” and I got to work fixing the seam and making a second version.

Delivery

So, yesterday I drove out to New Haven to deliver the piece. It was a beautiful day and the academy was gearing up for the September rush. After a little awkward where-can-I-find-you emailing, we met up in the eighth floor lounge where the piece will be hung. I was saddened, to say the least, to learn that I’d be displacing this masterpiece.

But once I got over that heartbreak, I went up to Prof. Minsky’s office to talk about the math that went into it. We had a couple of great hours at the chalk board solving the mystery of the seam and discussing the group of symmetries that the loxodromic panel has.

The Math

I don’t want this part to be the part that nobody reads, so I’m going to try to ease into it a little with a psychedelic gif! The panel is a representation of a loxodromic Möbius transformation in the complex plane. Most people would say that that looks like this:

Which is cool. The transformation is actually just a way of taking some point and moving it to another point in the plane. Pick a point and this transformation is like an assignment of where that point goes.

So in the above trippy gif, if you pick a square and follow it with your eyes, after one second, say, you have seen it move to its new location. Wait another second and you’re moving it again.

There are two special points. You’ll see that any square you pick gets sucked into the left special point and if you turned time backwards, you’d see they’re all coming from the right point. There are some invisible curves which are invariant, meaning that a point that’s on that curve stays on that curve. The Las Vegas of the complex plane.

And when you put a bunch of these curves together, you start to see something like the rendering I did in wood:

But instead of red lines of graph paper, I decided to show the lumpy snakes in black walnut on top of maple.

The lumpy snakes aren’t just any old lumpy snakes though. The intent there is to show that when you apply the transformation once you move one lump to the next.

Where the yellow arrow represents the action of the transformation.

For the non-mathematicians out there, this diagram looks like a “symmetry”. Normally we talk about symmetry where you flip something over and it’s the same. Faces are symmetrical because the left and the right are mirror images. But this kind of symmetry is a broader concept (that includes the mirror kind) where applying some transformation keeps everything the same.

In the case of this panel, there’s the symmetry that you get when you apply the loxodromic transformation (above) but there’s more! There’s another symmetry that comes from moving one lumpy snake onto its neighbor lumpy snake:

Here the purple arrows represent a different transformation. And you could combine these to your hearts content.

And any combination of yellow-purple-purple-yellow, eg., will give you another symmetry.

There’s more to say here and if you’re interested, I’ll be writing up some longer form descriptions, including a post-mortem on what happened with the seam on the first version. That will be released as an addendum to the piece when it’s finally up for display.

More behind the scenes

In the coming months I’m going to be documenting the building process for a set of four tables that I’ve been commissioned to make.

It’s going to be enormously challenging and interesting and if you know anyone who likes seeing problems solved, you should definitely let them know.

Thank god May-cember is wrapping up. All of the work, parenting and social goings-on of the spring are really getting in the way of my gardening time. But, of course, I kid.

In anticipation of an extra large and prominent booth space this weekend, it’s been a production binge here and I’m working a vein of mathematically generated surfaces that’s turning out to be really thrilling.

Last weekend I was at Paradise City in Northampton, MA and having a chance to interact with people and my work revealed a lot of things I’m anxious to do. It was an amazing show but for an “incident” that ended in a compound femoral fracture of my trapezoidal table, who is currently in the OR awaiting the plastic surgeon.

And this right after it made its debut on the world stage in last months Fine Woodworking magazine. Thoughts and Prayers.

I’m putting lots of fresh stuff on instagram as I finish it up so make sure to take a look!

Sometimes it feels like every piece I finish is my magnum opus. I’m a better craftsman now that I was last month and I’ve refined my design aesthetic further. My understanding of wood species is better and I have more experience with how to treat the surface. I still make plenty of mistakes and it’s often frustrating and demoralizing! But as Greg LeMond said about cycling: “It never gets easier; you just go faster”

But something about this piece, and its reception, has given me an extra sense of pride in the result. I schlepped it a few hundred miles last week to the Paradise City craft show near Boston where it enjoyed a steady stream of gushing compliments from the fairgoers. And when I delivered it to the client soon after, the response was so appreciative and kind I nearly cried.

This piece was a commission based on a nightstand I made to manifest some ideas that I needed to get out there. The little one is a single drawer over a cabinet door and even though the patterns on the panels are similar, there’s a lot of differences that I had to manage when scaling up. The handles changed. The pie safe is symmetrical while the nightstand is not. I adjusted the legs and the top to feel more like a cabinet and less like a table.

And the rippling patterns on the panels went through a ton of iterations and adjustments. Getting a feel for the way the textures play against the overall shape, the hardware and the details of the woodworking.

Does this spark an idea for a table, a bench, or a bed? Now might be a good time to look around your house and reconsider that nightstand you found by the dumpster in college. You deserve beautiful things.

I’m channeling that energy into some creative work this week to push forward projects that I haven’t even conceived of yet!

Currently on the carving robot, I have a lot of circular wave patterns that are inspired by (read models of) the waves that the head of a drum makes when struck. I’m making my way through understanding good scales to work at and how these kinds of ripples interact with the material that they’re carved from.

I’m thinking a lot about light. Objects like these are SOOO dependent on the lighting around them. So why not make these into lighting and really lean into it. I think that’s where this is headed. We’ll know soon.

I’m grateful that I got some time to reorganize my workspace. It’s more open, tidier and more conducive to creative design and exploration. Yes to all of those. I’m thinking a lot about Sister Corita Kent’s Ten Rules. And Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and being more intentional in my work. It’s a journey.

I’m grateful that this crackpot idea I had to make furniture for a living is getting a footing and becoming something real. I had a nice piece in the local paper and word of mouth is a powerful thing. What a privilege it is to be able to follow my passion wherever it leads.

And I’m grateful for the support of my family, my friends and my community. Happy Holidays!!

I've been spending most of the last few weeks getting ready for the upcoming Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton, MA next weekend (October 11-13). It's going to be my biggest show to date, so I need stuff to bring—and not just anything, but pieces that really show what I'm all about.

My strategy for shows like this is to make small, exemplary pieces that I can use to talk to people about what they might want to commission me to make for them. These aren't just display pieces; they're conversation starters, demonstrations of technique, and glimpses into the kinds of mathematical concepts and organic forms that inspire my work.

In The Shop

To that end! Here’s a quick summary of what’s been coming out of (actually taking up an unreasonable amount of space in) my shop over the last couple weeks.

Ribbon Table

This Ribbon Table is something I started over the summer at Anderson Ranch but it took a few months to bring it to its logical conclusion. The six bent lamination legs nest into one another like an ouroboros wrapped around a torus (toroboros?)

The geometry required each leg to be precisely shaped so they could flow continuously while supporting the glass top. There's something hypnotic about following the ribbons with your eye as they weave through space. Made from ash with a glass top that lets you appreciate the full sculptural quality of the base.

Interference Nightstand

This piece is all about the dialogue between traditional craft and mathematical pattern. The Interference Nightstand uses classic shaker-style frame and panel construction, but with intricate wave patterns carved into the panels and drawer fronts.

The handles—custom made from black walnut and brass—aren't just functional elements; they puncture the piece at the exact points where the ripples are centered. When these ripples propagate outward and interact with each other, they produce those subtle and fascinating interference patterns you might remember from physics class (or a still pond). The whole piece becomes a meditation on wave behavior, frozen in wood. Black walnut and brass.

Demilune

Sometimes the math is quieter, more subtle. This solid walnut demilune is my take on the classic form of the half-round table that sits against a wall. The design question I was asking: how do you make something that feels like it was carved from a single curved form rather than assembled from straight parts?

The answer came through in the details. The legs are subtly rounded to match the bent lamination of the aprons, giving the entire piece the feeling of being carved from a cylinder. The walnut I used for this one is especially shimmery—that chatoyant figure that catches the light—and gives the whole thing a really elegant, understated presence.

Come See Them in Person

If you're in the area next weekend, I'd love to see you at Paradise City. These pieces will be there, and I'll be ready to talk about commissions, custom work, or just geek out about the intersection of mathematics and furniture making.

What a horrible tragedy (yay!). Let’s mourn the passing of this great and ancient creature (MINE!).

I’m a wood scavenger. And for scrounging hobos like me, this is the big score. It really is an awesome tree. Earlier this week I took it to a local saw mill and spent a day with the tree, going through each segment and cutting it up exactly how I want it.

These are a few of the segments.

And this is the saw at the saw mill. I will be doing some serious gushing about this saw so if that’s not something you’re into, just share this email with someone who is and get on with your day.

Some of these pieces have big cracks (checks) that run along the length. I know I can’t get big wide boards out of those so I cut them thick to use for table legs. A couple of the pieces have a branch coming out of the side and this is walnut gold. It’s called crotch and I could stare at it all day!

The grain patterns from the main trunk and the branch intersect to make some incredible swirly forms that are especially great in walnut. Being able to pick apart the tree as it’s being milled to get exactly the cuts I want is just so awesome. All of this wood is going to go into a kiln for a couple of weeks and then I have to figure out where to keep it. There is A LOT! But rest assured that I’m going to be making some amazing furniture with it over the next several years.

Wood aside, the saw mill is just incredible. It’s been operating for almost 100 years and it shows. The vibe is somewhere between pirate ship and steampunk moonshine shack. ❤️

6 drawers plus four internal trays. All of these are fit without metal runners. It’s just wood-on-wood. So you can forgive me for obsessing about drawers a little.

Tactile

Near the end of this project I was chatting up a fellow dad at a kid’s party and talking about my work. I’d been thinking so much about the drawers and how they feel. I hadn’t fully put it into words before that but I kept circling back to the word tactile. I think this piece is very nice to look at but it is a goddamn pleasure to use.

Material

The client for this piece wanted to keep clean lines and minimalist form but also appeal to a more rustic vibe for a house in the country. To get there, I leaned on the materials to add texture and contrast to a minimalist shaker design.

Everything outside is black walnut from a stand of trees that I scavenged as they were being taken down for an orchard a couple of years ago.

The top was hand-selected from the lumber yard. It’s an amazing slab and there’s so much texture and figure for the light to bounce around on and through.

The interior of the case, the drawer boxes and all of the trays are white oak. It’s like the lining of a coat every time you open it up.

I love making my own pulls for casework. I think it’s a really great place to do design. I especially like doing it at the very end, when I can look at the overall form and all the features together. It’s like putting jewelry on once the outfit is complete.

In this case, I wanted to highlight the way the two materials work. Walnut on the outside and white oak inside. The handles are walnut, but there’s a little piece of oak that holds them to the drawers. You only see it when you’re right up close and about to grab it, like a preview of what you’ll see when you look inside.

In other news

This beautiful walnut tree spent the last 80 or so years growing at the historical society in Sharon, CT and came down in a storm last month.

It’s mine now and it’s going to make some really amazing furniture. There is a coffee table in there somewhere that’s going to change the way you live.

Some drawers are bad. Some are ok. Every once in a while there’s a drawer that is just amazing. I want to make amazing drawers. An amazing drawer draws its puller in (or does it pull its puller in?) without a conscious thought. It’s one of those things you love without knowing it. The drawer that runs smoothly and has a soft handle is where you put your favorite thing. The good scissors go in the good drawer. It’s tidier than other drawers.

When I talk about a drawer, I’m referring to the drawer box (where the stuff goes) as well as the means of its operation, aka, the old in-out.

You also need a handle or a pull or a finger hole to grab onto. And stops, which prevent it from going too far in or falling right out.

Let’s start at the box. Five sides: front, back, left, right and bottom. Sometimes there’s an additional false front that goes on top of the front of the box after the box is installed to make it easier to align with the frame of the cabinet and neighboring drawers. This is usually how kitchen drawers are done and its main job is to conceal the joinery and messiness of the drawer box itself. If you’re into that kind of thing.

Nowadays, the bottoms are almost always made of plywood which is frankly a magical material that, unlike solid wood, does not expand and contract in the seasons. This means that you can glue a plywood bottom to the rest of the sides without the risk certainty that it will rip itself apart come a muggy August morning. When you use an old, not-so-well-made, drawer you can tell the bottom is flapping around in there with no support and it feels crappy. But also kind of charming like an old cabin on a lake.

There are a million ways to attach the other four pieces to each other from pocket screws (cheap and easy) to hand-cut dovetails:

But generally, the joint between the front and the sides has to be the strongest because that’s what gets yanked on day after day. For that reason, dovetails are a classic, robust option.

So you made a box. Whoop dee doo! Without a way for it to slide in and out of a cabinet, it’s just a box. So let’s talk about slides and runners and the third option, which is neither, or nothing.

The naive way to make a drawer do the drawer thing is to just fit it in a hole that’s a little bigger than it is. This is totally valid and can be really nice in certain ways but it’s finicky and tends to get stale over time as the drawer rubs agains the surface under it. And don’t forget that wood gets bigger and smaller with the seasons so a nice drawer in February is stick by Labor Day. I’m not sure there’s an agreed upon name for this type of drawering but the best I have is a piston fit drawer.

Slightly more sophisticated is to put runners under the drawer on either side that are designed to hold it up. Careful it doesn’t have space on top or it will flop down when you pull it out. And if it’s loose on the sides… bummer.

Next we have side-hung drawers with have groves in the sides of the drawer box and runners in the cabinet that fit snugly in them. This is more work but gives a really nice feel.

In both these cases, it’s important to use a wood that’s hard wearing, meaning it can take a lot of abuse. Ash and oak are great. Teak is amazing because it’s naturally oily and that greases the skids, so to speak. In any case, it’s not a bad idea to put some wax on the runners to keep them smooth and to top it off it it gets a little too rubby.

We’re just getting to the rim of the rabbit hole now but next time you go to grab your undies, your spatula or a 24x36 print from the flat file, give that drawer some love.

Good!

I’ve been busy making furniture for clients which is what I want to be doing. Yesterday, when I should have been hitting publish on this blast, I was in a van down by the river —The East River— delivering 200 pounds of buttery smooth American black walnut to its forever home in Manhattan.

The Table

Simple, wood-forward and built for the space and needs of the client, this table is meant to be passed down to grandchildren, not chucked in a dumpster after senior year.

It’s a table. Eat on it. Put drinks on it. Spill wine on it. It can take some damage and when that damage is too much, it can be repaired: sanded and refinished for another batch of toddlers to have their way with.

It’s not a political table. But it it captures a little bit of my personal distaste for consumerism and disposability. It costs more than an Ikea table. But it costs less than 5 Ikea tables (don’t quote me on that. I don’t know what an Ikea table costs.) But try sanding a refinishing an Ikea table. It won’t go well.

Dinner Time

I don’t want to lean too hard on the American family around the dinner table because, ew, but if you know me, you know that I think about food a lot and the experience of eating. The dinner table is where that happens, at least in the context of a family home, and it’s a place for bonding and memory making. I think that’s important enough to put some thought and time into.

So the table is homey, cozy, heimish, hygge (remember ‘hygge’ craze of 2017 when it became a lifestyle marketing pillar?). The legs are stout, round and curvy. The lines are all soft with barely a corner in sight. The wood is heavily textured and very buttery to touch. VERY!

And in its new home in midtown Manhattan, a little hygge goes a long way. The clients had been in the space for less than a day when I delivered it, so warmth, comfort and softness were much in need.

After unloading and assembling, I sat down for some takeout with the family. Nothing beats Manhattan takeout. But it wasn’t until I was in the U-Haul on the way home that I realized that we didn’t sit at the table. We were elbow to elbow at a folding card table that was there from the previous owner. The food was great. We bonded and made memories. I guess you can’t buy hygge after all.

Bending, and by extension curved shapes, require a little stretching for me as a maker who really enjoys predictable geometry. But what I learned is that you don’t have to sacrifice precision to make some really beautiful curves. So stretch I did. And twist and contort.

I made the two things which are totally different but capture the spirit and content of my time there.

1. Side table

2. Lantern

The class, Digital and Organic: Wood Bending and the CNC, looked mostly at bent lamination, where wood is cut into thin veneer, so that it can bend like ribbons or paper. These strips can be put into a form with glue and when the glue sets, the shape stays. The forms can take all kinds of shapes but the class focused on leveraging computer controlled cutting machines to produce precise mold shapes.

This beast of a mold was how I made the bendy legs for the side table. The tube coming out of the top of this is a vacuum. The laminations are in a snake-shaped plastic bag that’s under vacuum. The air pressure on the outside of the bag is providing the pressure to squeeze the layers together. The clamps are holding the ends of the pieces straight and vertical so that when the piece comes out of the mold, there is reference geometry to key off of when assembling them together.

When the legs come out of the mold, and after a good bit of crusty glue removal with a grinder, they look like this.

Shaping these consistently took a good bit of patience but more importantly it required making a template, which was just a strip of paper that I could trace onto the untrimmed pieces.

A side note to my future self: the template is just as strip of paper and couldn’t be easier to make. By spending a couple of minutes prepping each piece the griding and shaping process got so much more quickly. Make the damn template.

Each leg spent twelve hours in the mold to make sure the glue was fully set and the wood couldn’t spring back into its original shape. So that was three full days of just cycling pieces in and out of the beastly mold.

The mold for the lantern was much simpler. Just a rounded blockish piece that the thin layers are placed on top of. When the whole thing goes into a large vacuum bag, the pressure forces the layers of veneer into the right shape and the glue holds them there when it cures. The result is curved plywood sheets.

The complexity of the lantern piece comes from the precise angles that the plywood is cut to. By angling the cuts in both directions I was able to get the alternating trapezoid shape of the lantern. This involved some high-flying geometrical acrobatics and a landing that I had to stick on the table saw.

Seems safe.

Not all bent lamination is made using a vacuum bag, it just happened to be the right technique for both of these shapes. More often, pressure is applied using good old fashioned clamps and LOTS of them. Since coming back, I have begun work on a dining table commission that involves a curved apron and here it is in its mold.

It was all really thrilling to learn a set of new techniques like this and have the time to focus on doing some wild stuff with them. I dove into the projects without much of a plan and I’m really happy with what came out the other end. I’m already folding the knowledge into my practice and I can’t wait to see what else I can do with it.

In early 2024 I was on vacation and —no shocker— struggling with my life direction, which is something I do kind of a lot. This time around I was trying to be more intentional about my life moves because I had taken a few occupational turns that were maybe a little reactive and opportunistic.

The sand was helping. My family and my friends were helping. The Modelos were helping. It was my time to zoom out and focus on the big picture. It’s very easy to get lost in the weeds with the day-to-day but this was my time for the intentional process. It was my time to take long walks on the beach.

I took a walk with Erica, who is a world-class advice-giver. She can see through all the things I’m saying and tell me the thing I want, or need or am ignoring. I remember it like it just happened. We were rounding a point where the surf was piling up the seaweed on some rocks. There were kite surfers in the sky and pelicans pulling fish out of the water. I was rambling on about some bullshit and Erica said to me “math is your superpower”. 💡

The Kepler Salt Cellar

Wood is an amazing material. It catches light in really beautiful ways, sometimes on large flat planes and sometimes on curves. The Kepler salt cellars that I make are little bowls that work with the way the light plays on small, sometimes curved, facets. Lots of wide angles give great bouncing effects and just a little bit of self-shadowing. The effect is really dramatic.

All these facets are just parts of the shapes that they compose. The exterior is an octahedron and the interior is a cuboctahedron. The names are clumsy and the history of these things seems to involve a lot of white marble and togas. But in my heart of hearts I believe that there is something natural about regular shapes like this. The sphere, cube, cone, cylinder and all the Platonic solids evoke a sense that they exist outside of human experience. That they’re part of the makeup of existence.

The toga guys (actually chiton guys, because they were Greek not Roman) would have strongly agreed. In fact, they did a lot of weird mental gymnastics to sync shapes like these up with other super-human phenomena like planets and gods. I’ll leave the history buffing to Erica, but I’ll just say that the Pythagoreans were a full on cult and the Platonic solids matched with their elements.

Captain Planet much?

But now here is the crux. Why do these abstract, pure, geometrical shapes make a good salt cellar? A sphere makes a very good ball-bearing. A box is an efficient way to pack things. But this isn’t an engineering solution; it’s a design object. And the astral forms of the heavens have no claim to perfect salt cellar shape.

Back to the beach!

Squaring The Circle

I’m not a horn-blower. But I’ve known for as long as I could ride a bike that math is my superpower. So, toot! But ultimately, math is abstract and I’m here to make physical things which are not abstract by definition. So my challenge is translating the beauty that I see in the abstract into the physical forms.

The challenge is how to square this circle? (Or get this square peg in the round hole?) How do I reconcile the unreconcilable: abstract ideas and physical beauty? I consider this my biggest challenge and quite possibly my life’s work. This is where I lean on my design training.

Step 1: iterate. Step 2: iterate again

There’s really no substitution for the iterative design process. You gotta make it, look at it, talk about it and make it again. It will never be perfect but eventually it will have to be done. The idea for a polyhedral salt cellar came out of a particularly intense magna-tiles sesh but it didn’t look anything like this at first. I had to draw it, make it and start all over dozens of times.

By going through this dance, I can grow a design from a conceptual seed. What’s overall shape? How is it realized? What materials am I using and how are they finished? It’s a lot of decisions —it’s all decisions — and they all relate so the only way to understand the result is to make it and see it. And, as a side benefit, it’s a great way to accumulate lots of small pieces of firewood.

Show Don’t Tell

Making things that are inspired by math is my way of sharing the beauty that I see in the abstract world. The issue is that sometimes those ideas can be opaque, inaccessible and require some long forgotten high school geometry to understand.

I can teach the math. I can give some appreciation to even the most math-phobic people. I know I can. But that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to translate the ideas into a language that people want to hear and to meet them where they are.

The Kepler’s interior volume is half of a cuboctahedron. I think these shapes are amazing, so much so that I made this little card to include with every one I sell:

Cute. Nerdy. Very much my way of thinking about things. It’s worth putting these things in the newsletter but it’s not the point of the salt cellar. The salt cellar is for the salt and the people salting. It should stand on its own.

Making Shapes

Cambridge, MA. February 1997.

BC calculus is in full swing and Valentines Day is fast approaching. At age 18, I was not any better at gifts and cards than I am now. But what I was good at, and still am, is turning a shape into an equation. So, as a grand gesture of affection for one lucky lass, I wrote a limerick and printed it alongside a rendering of a three dimensional red and purple heart in the style of Wolfenstein 3D. True Love.

Discovering that I could use a computer to actualize abstract math was a huge revelation for me. To this day, I do this a lot. See for instance the top of this stool:

Bringing a CNC machine—that can carve computer instructions— into my shop last year really opened up my practice to do things like this.

The Math-Art Interface

This stool was the seed that started a conversation with Emily Weiner, a painter whose work deals a lot with symbols, Jungian psychology and the unseen. She wanted to talk about using this kind of rippling effect to create a series panels (for paintings) to convey the underlying structure of space and time.

We had countless conversations about the fabric of the universe, gravitational waves, quantum foam, black holes and the distortion of space-time. YES! Folding these ideas from physics and math into her work and the psychological landscape has been a really fascinating project.

The goal was to solidify some of these ideas into scientific principles, conceptual abstractions and eventually physical artifacts that would become the base for some upcoming paintings. We made 4 at first. They went very well and this week I finished up the third batch.

After 3 rounds of 3-4 panels each, we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t from technical and aesthetic perspectives. It’s hard to know in advance what happens when a surface like this is painted. Suddenly the direction the light is hitting the surface makes a huge difference. The frames take on a life of their own when viewed from the side and it’s generally a new approach to painting.

Making More Shapes

The very first panel we talked about was a 3D version of this shell/spiral shape that shows up in several of Emily’s paintings.

After a little time diddling around with pencil and paper I came up with this equation, which

wraps a circular ripple pattern around a spiral.

Which looks like this:

It’s crazy to me that you can capture such a subtle and beautiful shape in such a succinct equation. Maybe it’s easier than I think it is, but being able to translate a shape into an equation might be my superpower.

But the design of the surface doesn’t stop at the equation. A lot of work goes into fitting it appropriately to the panel size and tweaking parameters to get the shape just the way we want. This is something we’ve learned to do together to great effect.

Frames

We talked more about the idea that the panels are a little window that shows the true nature of the universe that’s hiding all around.

To capture this idea a little more precisely, Emily wanted to use a method from some of her previous work where the painting’s frame takes a 3D shape. But in this case, the shape would be an extension of the shape of the panel.

This is an amazing sculptural technique that highlights the shape of the panel by cutting it with a very precise gap before the frame. The frames are eastern black walnut that I harvested from a local property, milled and cured over the last year or so. I’m combining a lot of traditional woodworking techniques withe the CNC to get the idea of a frame subjected to the same rippling distortion as the rest of the panel.

Fabrication

Making the frames is slow and precise work. Sometimes meditative, sometimes tedious, it’s the application of a woodworking skill set that I’m confident with. The corners are perfectly mitered with low-contrast spline joints for strength and as a reference to traditional techniques, but without drawing attention away from the painting.

Once the frames are constructed, they’re carved on the CNC at the same time as the panel to create a perfect illusion of continuity between them. After some missteps, I’ve learned to create the gap after the carve by cutting away the outer 1/4” of the panel.

Even the backs of the frames contain a lot of engineering and infrastructure. Because the panels are heavy, they need to be held tightly in place. But Emily needs to be able to take them in and out with screws so she can paint and reattach them after shipping. There’s a cleat hanging system embedded in the depth of the frame to make life easy for gallerist and collector alike.

At the end of the day, I’m making the panels for Emily to paint on. And paint on them she does! I’ll let her work speak speak for itself.

Thanks for reading The Increment. I’ll be back in two weeks with a road-show post from Anderson Ranch in Colorado.

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I spent last week at Penland, the absolutely legendary craft school in the Blue Ridge Mountains, for a short, intense class on tambour door construction. I made this.

Tambour doors are those sliding slatted doors, like you’d find in a roll-top desk. For me, the class was all about skill building and knowledge sharing. The piece, while cute, isn’t really the point of why I went. I wanted a chance to put all the day-to-day stuff of life aside and focus on learning and growing.

Embodied practice

During the orientation at Penland, students are asked not to take videos of the instruction because “craft is an embodied practice”. Cringe, as the kids say. But I know that that’s my internal cynic guarding the gates so let’s unpack a little.

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I took this to mean that there was some nebulous energy that arose around the hot glue gun. The phrase “embodied practice” carries a lot of baggage and I think for that reason I misunderstood the content of the statement. The “baggage” involves healing, wellness, wholeness and spirituality (google it). But I think the meaning is more direct — It’s a practice that lives in the body.

I’m a self-taught woodworker (YouTube) so taking this class was my first real in-person instruction. The instructor, Sarah Marriage, in addition to being a brilliant craftsperson, is a world class designer of fine furniture. But beyond the wealth of skill and knowledge she brought to the studio, she also conveyed the urgency, experience, culture and tactile feedback that just doesn’t come through a screen.

What I mean is that teaching and learning furniture-making—and woodworking—are things you do with your hands, shoulders, ears, center of gravity, nose, etc. Having learned almost everything I know online, I’ve been missing this piece. Objectively, I understand that when I smell burning, it’s likely my blade is dull or what the different grits of sandpaper feel like and what kind of finish they accomplish. But going through the subtle and specific motions required to trim the wedge on a tapered round through tenon is a whole nother potato.

When I was in architecture school, one of my favorite things to say was “think with your hands”. First, it’s a quit-yer-whining. But more substantially it’s a distillation of the fact that our nervous system doesn’t stop at our neck. There’s knowledge in your body that you can’t access no matter how long you stroke your beard. This is apparent for note-takers and doodlers but it especially applies to craft where the doing and the thinking are one in the same.

It’s social

We humans have this amazing ability to zoom in and out of the space we’re inhabiting and the activity that’s happening in it. It’s like we can focus different senses and sensors on different things at the same time to form a picture that’s far more than visual.

So when you’re learning something subtle and physical like trimming those tenons, you can simultaneously absorb the flick of the wrist, leg positioning, how much pressure is applied and where your weight is. Screens just don’t do this. It’s not magic. It’s our social evolution to be extremely keen observers of the people around us.

(Sidebar, I’ve always thought that I’m a liiiiittle bit face-blind and I make up for it with body language, gait, posture and other physical cues)

There’s a certain arrogance to the knowledge that one acquires on the internet. That I’ve acquired on the internet. In a few minutes, you can get the shotgun version of a skill that people spend years or lifetimes developing, but you didn’t really learn shit. You got the TED talk. That’s it.

So the thing to do is to put in the time, do the work and be with people. This trip to Penland was the first of three craft schools I have scheduled for this summer. I’m planning on doing a full newsletter on each. I hope that writing about it all will make me better at extracting value in the form of knowledge, reflection and experience.

This is all part of me taking my craft more seriously and making the transition from someone who makes furniture into a furniture maker. In other words to shake off my imposter syndrome. Anybody need a table?

Tomatoes

Every year, I grow a garden. It’s a ton of work and every October I decide I’m not doing it again. Then May comes and the weather gets nice and I get suckered into a visit to the plant store and then, you guessed it, garden.

There are probably 50 or so different fruits and vegetables in there every year. Peas, garlic, zucchini, peppers (jalapeños, habaneros, Hungarian wax, serrano, etc) , cucumbers (pickling, lemon, slicing), strawberries, squash (who knows which kinds), , eggplant, leeks, fennel (bronze and not bronze), parsley, sage, rosemary, chives, leeks, lettuces, broccoli, kale, cabbage, corn and thyme. That’s not nearly all of it so, yeah, a lot.

But all of these beautiful, flavorful, healthy plants are just filling up the dirt in between my tomatoes. You cannot buy a tomato that holds a candle to one you grow. Even from a farmer’s market in August. Even from a farm stand at a tomato farm on planet Tomato. The human-tomato bond is so strong that the plants sense your pheromones when they germinate and develop their flavor profile to match their person’s. You have to imprint on a tomato plant.

Sunshine, where the sun don’t shine

But the real shocker—the click-bait payoff—is that tomatoes are not best when you first pick them, slice them and put them on ciabatta with bacon and romaine. Fronting aside though , that shit is pretty close to perfection. No! The best tomato is the one you pull from a glass mason jar when the snow is starting to melt and the firewood supply is running low.

You see, I plant a few beefsteaks, early girls and sungolds but the dragon I’m chasing is the canning tomato. Romas, plums, San Marzanos. I let them suck up all the sun all summer long and then through the homesteading alchemy of canning, I shove said sunshine into a Ball Jar with a rusty two-piece top and store it in the basement. They’re great in September and November. But when that can opens up to make bolognese in January. Get. Out. Of. Town.

The Wood Bank

For most things I make of wood, the wood needs to be dry before you can use it and living trees are not dry. The rule of thumb is that a board needs to dry about one year for every inch of thickness. So there’s a 1-3 year waiting period between when a tree is harvested —or foraged—and when it’s ready to be used in a project.

Ash trees are dying all the time because of the emerald ash borer 😢. And my friends and neighbors have to clear land for all kinds of reasons. So whenever a tree makes itself available to me, I do everything I can to transport it, mill it and stack it up so that my coffers are always plump.

The way that I love the tomatoes in the winter is the same way I love sourcing my own lumber from trees and setting it up to dry in a ramshackle barn for a few years. It feels like a 401k for wood. It takes a really long time to pay off and when the day-to-day urgency of all the other tasks are screaming at me, it is borderline irresponsible to spend my time sowing instead of reaping.

Time Capsules

But future Ari gets to open up the barn in a few years and dig through the stacks to find the perfect piece for a chair or a dresser or a crib. And I get to remember the tree that it came from, the day I spent milling it up and all the other things that were happening in my life at the time.

The changing table that I built for my daughter when she was born is made from an ash tree that used to live right outside our back door. Before it died—before I had any kids—it would be right there on summer nights, backlit by sunset as we had dinner on the patio. I managed to get a picture.

What I didn’t realize then is that you don’t mill trees that are near houses because they are inevitably riddled with hammock-hooks, tree house bolts or, in this case, lead bullets from target practice. Dozens of lead bullets. But all of that character and all of those stories make their way into the furniture.

The changing table is making its transition to dresser now as young Viv graduates from diapers. Past Ari had didn’t know what was to come of that tree. But he had the foresight to bury a little time capsule for me and I hope to pass that on to the next guy. It’s a gift I get to give and receive over and over again.

Last fortnight’s newsletter was a blast, and hearing from so many of you was honestly the best part. Thanks for the support — it really means a lot. Next week I’ll be doing a guest post over at The Woodworking Shed with a little bit of my history and philosophy as a woodworker. Now on with the show!

This week I want to show you a side table I just finished for a client. It’s designed to fit between two chairs and hold drinks, books, snacks — the usual. The surface is shaped like a trapezoid, like this:

Weird Little Object

Right off the bat: it’s a weird piece. Small, asymmetric, a little aggressive. Not a polite rectangle trying to blend in — this thing’s more like a geometric sculpture that happens to hold drinks. And if you know me, you know that’s the sort of thing I love. The size and shape gave me permission to treat it less like furniture and more like an object.

It started with the top. The trapezoid came from the space — a little gap between two chairs — but once I committed to it, I saw it less as a constraint and more as a creative prompt. It’s got this stretched, directional quality to it, almost like a slice of something larger. There’s movement in the shape. I can’t help but think of it as being a little sci-fi and a little mid-century modern at the same time.

Three-Legged Alien Vibes

Since the top leans toward a triangle, three legs made the most sense. I’d developed a few leg shapes in a stool series last year — tall, slender, a little alien.

There’s something about the tension in those forms — like they might crawl away if you’re not watching. I brought that energy in here, but kept the legs subtle: ash, sanded smooth, then dyed with India ink for a deep, matte black. Under the walnut top, they give the table an airy lift. With the smooth, shadowy finish and slender curves, they mismatch the top in a way that makes the top feel like a separate entity, floating or held in space.

Electrostatic Ornament

Then came the inlay. The pattern comes from the way protons and electrons create an electrostatic field in space. Each of the four points in the pattern — two of them close enough to form an oval — emitting an invisible charge that’s tracked by zebra-striping the resulting field. I developed a system of mathematical and digital tools to be able to draw and adjust the patterns until I had what I wanted.

The result looks like a storm trapped in a box; an infinite pattern, cropped and framed. The dark walnut seems voided by the birdseye maple while each wood brings their own grains and figures that interact at the interface. The innie and the outie.

Construction

Making weird furniture calls for using weird construction techniques and inventing some new ones. Most of the shape making work for this project was done on a CNC router - which takes computer code and translates it into a moving cutter that carves wood. However, that’s a far cry from pressing a button and having a table pop out of a printer like Mickey 17.

The top is a solid piece of black walnut into which I carved nine pockets — each 1/4” deep — with walls beveled at 7.5°. Similarly, I cut nine plugs tapered the other way. All the plugs get glued into the holes and create a tight fit that is held not only with the glue but also with the friction of the wedging action.

With all the plugs and pockets cut out, I can fit it together with some glue.

Once it’s all set dry, the excess material around the inlays is planed away to make a flush, continuous surface of two materials.

Final Form

This piece isn’t trying to be quiet or blend in — it’s staking out its own little patch of living room like a spaceship that landed between two chairs. And honestly? I love that.

If you love this kind of work, I’m here for it. Let me know if this inspires something for you!

<straightens tie>

I’ve been trying to think of a way to reach out to everyone who subscribed and show my appreciation. Then I realized 💡, it’s this. This is the way. So thank you! This is going to be great!

This week, I’ll be discussing Longitude, a sculpture in black walnut and brass. It measures about 24”x12” and stands about 4” at its tallest. The name, Longitude, comes from the brass strips that run north/south as longitudinal lines on a map. It’s a model of Indian Mountain, in northwest Connecticut. (More on why later.)

This project started back in November, when I was doing a series of material studies combining brass and black walnut. I adore the combination. It’s got a Don Draper, mid-century class to it, and when it's finished well, it does magical things with light.

I was trying to understand how these materials behave when they’re flush in the same geometry. That’s really hard to describe so here’s a picture:

Much better. Tell me that doesn’t look like AI. It’s not, I swear.

I cut channels in the walnut, inlaid the brass, and then carved a ripple pattern across the top — borrowed from another project. It looked great. I loved it. Sometimes I’d just stand there and pet it while waiting for glue to dry.

So into the ideas pile it went, like so many other beautiful dead ends.

Then, a few months later, my kid’s school put out a call for artists to create unique works for a fundraiser. The theme was “Mountain,” and the lightbulb went off. What if I took that material study and used it to make a topographic sculpture of the mountain the school sits on?

So I mapped out the process:

1. Find the GIS data for the area and download it as a mesh (easier said than done, but eventually done)

2. Trim and scale the mesh into a object with a composition I’m happy with.

3. Repeat the steps from the material study but at a much larger scale.

There are details of course. Just remember that most mistakes in woodworking are errors in chirality. And also that brass is a lot harder to cut than I thought.

So how’d it all go down?

After wrangling the landscape mesh into something my computer didn’t hate, I scaled it and framed it in a way that I felt held the mountain well. At this point there’s a lot of gory detail involving CAM software and router bits but I’ll spare you. If you’re interested, my YouTube channel is probably the best place to look.

The topography is real — every peak and valley mapped from the actual terrain — but the form it lives in is intentionally abstract. Not only is the piece unnaturally cropped, but the brass imposes a system of organization that the landscape didn’t ask for.

With the 3D model dialed in, I moved to the materials. Black walnut, milled from rough boards. The brass bar stock couldn’t go in as full rectangles; that would be too much cutting for my feeble CNC (a computer-controlled cutter, for those of you who have never joined a makerspace) to handle. So I had to cut the brass to a rough outline first and have the machine dial in the details with a final pass.

Twin Peaks

With my plan dialed in, my materials prepped and all my pieces cut out, I was off to my first rodeo.

I laid out the brass ribs and triple checked that they were in the right order before gluing them into the slots cut in the wood. I hoisted the 40 pound assembly onto the CNC, clamped it down twelve different ways and hit the start button.

Everything seemed to be going well until I started to notice that the shape being carved into the wood wasn’t following along with the brass ribs. The ribs were supposed to be just slightly taller than the eventual shape to minimize the amount of material removed but it wasn’t tracking.

Then it hit me.

The ribs were in the right order, but I’d put them in backwards, flipped, mirrored. It was an error of chirality.

Every woodworker has made this mistake in one way or another. A hour spent on a left-handed screw that just won’t budge. A saw blade put in backwards. A table leg with the joinery reversed. You scrap the part and move on.

But I still had a lot to learn from this hunk of cellulose and copper alloy and I wasn’t going to chuck it that quickly. The CNC hadn’t actually hit any of the brass yet so there was still a mountain waiting for me inside this pile of sawdust. It just happened to be flipped.

Back at the computer, I reversed the model in virtual space and sent the output back into the mortal coil of the CNC machine. When the carve finished I had a beautiful, albeit ass-backwards incarnation of Indian Mountain.

With that lesson learned, I rewound the tape and started back at the beginning with a fresh piece of walnut. Now, with the advantage of a nearly perfect prototype, I could make some subtle adjustments to my design and process. Everything went smoothly the second time around.

(If you’re interested in purchasing a reverse mountain sculpture, let me know)

Just The Glamor Shots

When it's finished, the brass twinkles and the walnut shimmers. The materials are so different but they occupy the same geometry in an uncanny way. The thickness of the brass ribs gets exaggerated by the steepest slopes of the mountain.

The flush material change is so apparent at the ends where the object is formally, and literally, cut off with disregard for what’s in the path of the blade. There’s a violence to the extraction of the rectangle from its natural setting.

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