sunday morning ramble

courtesy of gene ladassor...

"Art / Craftsmanship. I've wondered about those two words and thought that someday I might be one or the other. When I started in the trades I worked for in concrete and was amazed at the foundation man who could do 28 step downs and 16 corners on a hillside foundation and end up square and level. After I learned what it took to do that job I wasn't as amazed as I was humbled. "Well done" are the best words you can say to that man. When I learned to frame a house plumb and square, and stack it's roof not with trusses but stick frame, I found out the satisfaction of being the one who was told, "well done". When I first built my own cabinets and learned how to build stairs and do all the various types of trim that can go into a house, I would hear the words again "well done". When I started to build the whole house for people I heard those words again. But I think that great craftsmanship and maybe art is lost on people that have not raised their own hands to a project, have not struggled with learning to hold a pencil correctly, to balance their body just so that the hand plane, chisel or saw doesn't twist out of mark. I can pick up or look at a piece of work today and I can appreciate a fine line, I can forgive a flaw, it was made by a person who is fallible and who has struggled to finish that project. He knows the flaw is there and regrets it, after 20 or thirty years of doing it you won't find that flaw, they'll be there but you won't find them, he knows where they are though and regrets them. I like to think that in all the years I worked my trade, that I learned the art of craftsmanship. I know what goes into something made by hand. I know how much effort goes into teaching those hands to do that task.
I may not know and fully grasp the math of a fly rod. But I know what it takes to create one, I know what the mind and hands and heart have to do to reach the final point of handing one over for the final inspection by the client. Tolstoy said "There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of it. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art."
I can give all sorts of guff and prodding to people here on this board, but I can never take away the final words of "well done" to Glistas Salmon flies or Shays and GB's and Mike's rods, or the personal experience that at bottom line unites us all here in that moment when the line unrolls over our shoulder, lays down in slow motion on the water and that trout sips.
I think art is maybe something that is not a trick (thank you Ralph Waldo) But something that is however fragile or stout, is real. It's done with craftsmanship and touched with hands that make it real and useful for the subject it was meant for.
I want the Rod named Ren's Inheritance. Because someday when this vehicle I am riding around in has ceased to work, it will be hers, and she will be able to appreciate the work, art, craftsmanship because I taught her how to."

well done sir.