The Pursuit of Woodwork Perfection

“Being focused on the end can be very good if you want to make money, because it means you get a lot of stuff out the door. I’ve never been like that.”

The chair

Robert Howard is a master woodworker based in Brisbane, and he has spent years honing his craft. Getting a piece right matters more to him than getting it finished. “I like to be able to keep going at it until I’m happy,” he says.

Way back when he started out, one of the first pieces he made was a chair he had designed a few years before. He has wrestled with it on and off ever since. “Must have made more than 30 times, I imagine, and I’m still not happy with it.” At times he has suspected he has been going backwards, not forwards. He will keep making it anyway. “I can feel one coming up.”

Forks in the road

Robert teaches, and there is one thing he tells his students all the time: make things more than once. Every piece is a run of decisions, forks in the road where you choose to do this or that, and once you have chosen there is no going back.

“You can take the wood away, but you can’t put it back.”

The first couple of times through, he says, you learn the form. You learn what it is you are making, which parts are difficult, and which you have to be particularly careful with. “Then you can start making something.”

Simple is hard

Looking back over everything he has made, the pieces Robert likes most are often the simplest. They can be very difficult to make, but with so few elements there is less to get working together.

Pieces with a lot of turns are harder. “You get it right from one view, and then it turns around, and suddenly there’s something that you can’t live with.”

Hope, not expect

Perfection can be a problem, Robert says, if you let it spoil your enjoyment of what you are doing. He has known people like that, people who get down on themselves because a piece isn’t perfect. It doesn’t happen to him.

“I don’t expect it to be perfect. I hope it’ll be perfect, but I don’t expect it.” When a piece turns out with problems, he is quite happy to have another go.

He is very much a perfectionist, by his own account, and that is what keeps sending him back to the bench: to try and get it perfect, “which you never do.” The end never quite arrives. “No, never.”

About the film

The Pursuit of Woodwork Perfection was filmed and edited by Quinn Murphy, working on his own. It is the first film on Ordinary Giants from an outside contributor.