I walked into a local shop to see a long-time friend; I walked out carrying a century old Arts and Crafts era table lamp. I was not on a quest for a lamp. In fact, I did not really need that or any other lamp, but I saw it and it resonated. I knew exactly where it was going, and there you have it. More importantly, I knew exactly why I was buying it: It was a genuine Arts and Crafts Movement lamp.
I have long appreciated the Arts and Crafts movement that began with in the mid-1800s and continued for about seven decades. As an aside, periodically it comes back, if only in small doses. This interest began years ago when I read the three, sometimes tedious but always fascinating volumes of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Ruskin explained the guild system of how young masons learned their craft and advanced it into new forms of architecture. It was fascinating. After that, I was off and running, pursing this quest from Ruskin to William Morris to the Stickley brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Elbert Hubbard. The lamp was almost an act of my rebellion against the modern world.
The Arts and Craft Movement was open defiance against the industrial revolution, mass produced consumer goods, and in the case of Victorian era furniture, most of which was nauseating pseudo-Gothic over-embellishment. Over design and too many “foo foos” became popular despite being tacky.
For the most part, a designer would draw the plans for a piece of furniture, perhaps a chair. Then the design would be broken down into its components. It was called ‘piecework’ because templates, jigs and the necessary tools and dies were organized to create the parts. A young man or woman could easily and quickly be trained to make one part, put it on a conveyor belt to which additional components were added. The belt ended where workers assembled the parts together and the chair or other piece of furniture was completed and ready to be varnished, stained, or finished. From there it was shipped out across the country.
It was all very efficient, and consumers benefited from low cost manufactured goods. Ruskin and his followers found piecework soulless. Worse, image being a highly trained woodworker who once took quiet pride in being a master of their craft. Then they were thrown out of work at a small shop, and had to consider himself fortunate that he was hired to make the right front leg of a chair for months, if not years, on end.
The same sad story could be told in the United Kingdom where once proud cottage weavers were put out of work by huge factories. It was repeated in other industries, as well. Any attempt at individuality was squashed. Function became all important, to the detriment of beauty and form. Uniformity of design and construction benefited the manufacturer, not the consumer. An early example was the Ford Model T automobile. To keep prices low, the car came in one color – black.
That became even more obvious in the post-war years where planned housing and manufactured homes were introduced. The most notorious was Levittown in New York where farmland was converted into subdivisions, with uniform and identical homes lining treeless roads. The popular song of 1962, Little Boxes, was not a compliment. Fair warning: DO NOT look it up and listen to it because it will stay fixed in your mind.
The Arts and Crafts Movement flourished, then slipped away into obscurity, but it never really died. It was always present, just in the background. In the 1970s, during the fuel crisis and the rising cost of fresh produce, it gained increasing attention. PBS began programs such as Victory Garden, the New Yankee Workshop, and others. It led a return to the commitment to continuing the tradition of the old crafts, especially by using as many hand tools as possible to have a closer connection with the materials.
Today there is a new challenge to designing, inventing and making. It is AI or Artificial Intelligence. It can be used to design and direct an infinite number of identical products cranked out. For me, the real adversary in AI, is “Claude.” It can do all the writing and thinking for us, and we merely do a bit of tweaking and virtually no creating.
Last week Claude sent a very personalized message to me, congratulating on the articles I write for the newspaper, my sermons, and my mysteries. Then it made me an offer I quickly refused. All I had to do was spend a few hours working out up to ten new ideas for mysteries, list the characters, and Claude would take over from there. I could have ten new letter-perfect, proof-read manuscripts by Monday morning.
Claude seems to know too much about me for my comfort. That letter turned my stomach faster than a limburger, sardine, onion, and horseradish sandwich! AI writing will happen in this house right after charcoal sprouts and battleships fly!
The simple fact is that hands-on work in almost any endeavor brings more satisfaction than we may realize. Plant a vegetable garden, and all the work is rewarded with fresh vegetables and the joy of saying, “this came from our own garden.” If there is a surplus that we preserve, we can say that same thing in the midst of a blizzard.
Do anything “from scratch” and it is just plain rewarding, sometimes in unexpected ways. Perhaps the most important is a connection with other people.
About the time my lamp was being made, seven artists from Ontario went on an annual camping trip in the Hudson Bay district. They canoed in to their camp, set up their tents, cooked their own meals, and during the daylight hours, painted what they saw in nature. Known as the Group of Seven, they were teased by those who quipped the pun, “There is no tree in northern Ontario they didn’t paint.”
They painted, often talking and learning from one another. All too soon the day came when they had to return to civilization. They took their paintings to galleries, and no owner would represent them. They had to hold their own exhibition, but no one was buying their paintings. Fifty years later, and the Group of Seven was the toast of Canada, regarded as artistic geniuses because of their eye, palette, and style.
As I wrote at the beginning, I walked into a shop to see a friend and came home with a lamp. It’s in the living room where I can see it. The lamp is a constant reminder of the importance of the Arts and Craft Movement, and all it means to our joy and appreciation of a mind, hand, and determination to create something that has beauty, form, and function.
