I built that!

finding an old job in the wild

[ soundtrack : The Journey Home - Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson & Jon Christensen - 1978 ECM Records ]

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Not much going on in the workshop — lazy summer days.

I turn on the lights most days, but strangely, I don’t feel like doing much. I hang on the bench and maybe flip listlessly through a woodworking book or doodle a noodle while the radio plays something that passes through my head without leaving a trace. It’s peaceful and cool down in the cellar, but my urge to make anything seems to have dissipated in the heat.

I’d much rather sit at my desk upstairs, with the balcony door open, drinking beer and gazing out onto the huge beech trees that are my view, while writing really bad poetry — the most mawkish doggerel imaginable! Barely one good line among two hundred, yet it feels so profound in the moment! Sometimes, I think my greatest talent is for flattering myself.

my view of the elephant’s feet at ground level

Since springtime this year, I’ve begun taking my little compact camera with me for walks around town. I’ve written about this before; about how I like looking at the world, my hometown and trying to capture it; flatten it down to a two-dimensional representation that will convey at least a modicum of the real thing. I only have an old pocket camera, and I’m certainly not a skilled photographer; I’m just out and about searching for interesting things to look at. These last months, my project has been to post two pictures a day — one at lunchtime, the other after work. If I want to get better at making pictures I have to practice; every day, in volume. Proficiency is 10% talent and 90% perspiration.

I have little patience with wistful talk about inspiration; it’s just work — do it! Some of the pictures I take are not even mediocre, while others are OK — they have some quality of sorts. I select the best, delete the rest, publish and move on! It doesn’t matter very much. Who’s judging? What’s the prize? 5 or 10 likes on Substack? The important thing is that I practice my eye and learn to use my limited camera-tool to best effect. Your tool will always impose a limitation of sorts — ask rather what are the possibilities; what can you make it do? I can only improve with experience. And somehow, I suspect the camera is not the limiting factor in this equation.

Sometimes, a satisfied customer will praise my woodworking by gushing “Oh, you’re such an artist!” I always reply “No, I’m a competent and clever craftsman.” Because, if you‘re comparing me to the artists of old …

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1860s) - Ugolino and His Sons

… there is obviously no comparison. We do not do the same thing. If you are unable to distinguish between carving a piece of art out of marble and making a door out of wood … you are stupid.

I am a woodworker; I make useful, good-quality things out of wood. It is what it is, nothing more and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. When it comes to photography, I do not compare myself to any of the famous photographers … that would be very silly! But I do have a hero, a compatriot: Anders Beer Wilse. He was a prolific pioneer who made a living out of photographing our little country at the edge of the civilized world. He was a working photographer; everything was fair game for his lens: pittoresque landscapes, tourist postcards, state occasions, funerals & weddings, ship’s christenings … he was a documentarist more than an artist. Not that his work is void of artistic qualities; far from it! He had a highly developed flair for pictorial composition, and his photographic/chemical/optical/technical skills were first-rate — no effortless digital solutions in those days! He left a large corpus of materials, well preserved and digitally searchable in our museums, but what I like most about his work is his unpretentious documentation of everyday life.

And his townscapes … (Oslo is not big enough to speak of ‘cityscapes’)

There is a down-to-earth frugality in these pictures, a timely reminder to my effortlessly comfortable compatriots that life on a subarctic mountain range with 2,5% arable land does not necessarily entail oval shopping-weekends in London and New York with the girlfriends. It never used to … but who am I to quibble about the joys of living in a feckless petro-state? The party ain’t over till it’s over — there’s still cake and cocaine left!

Where was I, before I got seduced by my own verbosity? Camera! Walkabout!

I organize my excursions by date and place: from here to there is how I name my files of raw photos. Each walk, each part of town, each street has its own character, coloured by my memories and experiences along the way. There are streets that are so pregnant with meaning for me that … She lived here! Remember her in that summer dress - marine blue, little printed white flowers - how it cupped her breasts, making your soul groan with desire and how she wouldn’t sleep with you so long as her Grandmother was visiting?

The old Romans had a concept they called genius loci — we can perhaps translate it to the pervading spirit of a place. Each place has … if not an essence, then a character.

Are you able to tell the difference between the spirit of this place:

… and this:

Good, good!

Anyways … circling back (as they say); I was out walking my camera the other day; I took the tram over to the Old Town. There’s the old town, and then there’s that part of town that shelters under the rockfall, under the Ekeberg (OakMountain) cliffs. This is where Oslo’s original settlements were built; where the Lo River (Loelva nowadays called Alna) - mostly underground now - used to meet the sea.

I’ve always been fascinated by this part of town; where urbanitas meets stubborn, vertical nature (how Norwegian!) at its most uncompromising.

This part of town has a layered built heritage: From the medieval catholic cloister & church ruins …

… to the later renaissance additions — usually raised on the same foundations as the previous buildings, reusing what was left of the old stones.

It’s all still part of daily life.

I’ll try to get to my point now …

Here I was, out looking for things, spaces & places to take pictures of, slowly bumbing along … I haven’t been in these parts for … what? twenty years? … Still a highly incongruous part of town; historical buildings next to no-nonsense industrial sites; old, wooden working-class housing cheek by jowl with the gentrified versions of I belong here, too!

It can get so tidy that you’re pleased to see the results of a mental breakdown:

But as I was ambling along, admiring the steepness of the streets …

… a street name rang a bell — Konows gate … didn’t I do a job for Konows gate years ago? (I usually name my jobs - for administrative purposes - using the address — people move; the houses remain — and ‘gate’ = street)

windows w/detailing (so tasteless!) & wooden siding/panelling are obviously new - and very ineptly executed - but the structure underneath is original. It will likely outlast generations of incompetence.

Years ago — 15? — a carpenter kammerat asked me if I couldn’t make a long, plain balustrade measuring so-and-so for an old courtyard down in old town. He’d do the installation and paintwork. Of course I could!

This was when I held court in my second ‘proper’ workshop. Enough space, beautiful working light! from overhead skylights that leaked so I had to keep my thicknesser covered with a tarpaulin in case it rained.

Look at this lovely, fat & tight pine we got for the job!

Well made but nothing fancy: square, shouldered standers in mortises.

Quite long, so I made an accurate butt-joint spliced with let-in oak connecting-pieces; pre-drilled and fitted. Set in mastic — worked a treat.

This is a picture the carpenter took after he had installed them:

And here’s what I found on my walk 15 years later:

It’s neither glamorous nor well-paid being a woodworker — unless you get to be a famous online personality, and that’s a mind-fuck if I ever saw one — but it has its consolations: My hometown is full of jobs I’ve done, and I’ve tried to do them as best I can. It’s not much in the big bicture, but it’s not nothing, either! I pulled my straw to the stack. One among many. I’m in good company.

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