The Ballad of the Benches
A mountain that I had to ascend, or some sort of imaginary hurdle?
Note: You can listen to me read this Iteration to you by tapping the Play button at the top of the post.
Whether it’s a sheet of old plywood resting on a couple of sawhorses or a fastidiously crafted hardwood masterpiece, the workbench has long been the centerpiece of studios, workshops, garages, and maker spaces of all kinds.
Of the many standout features of our house, I think I was most excited about the multiple basement spaces that I would be able to use as studios for the different things I do. The previous owners were makers — she was a painter and he was a woodworker whose wood shop occupied one of the basement spaces. When we bought our house in 2016, I remember telling Adrianne that I wanted to make one of the spaces my paint studio and that I would make some benches “on day one.” Well, day one didn’t happen, nor did week one, month one, or year one. In fact, it’s taken me nearly nine years to finally build benches for my studio. So what happened?
It may sound strange, but workbenches loom large in my family history. Some of my earliest memories are of spending time with my grandfather in the garage that he built behind their house in Azusa, California. Against one wall was the workbench that he also built where he would do all manner of tinkering. It was also at that bench that I would draw with the little nubs of Blackwing 602 pencils that he gave me when they were too small for him on pieces of Kraft paper torn from a roll mounted on the end of the bench.
When I got older, my dad inherited the house and the workbench, and my time in the garage went from drawing to helping him with whatever he was doing — sometimes rebuilding an engine, other times working on something for the house — but still there was the bench at the center of it. When I was in junior high school, he taught me to weld, first with an arc welder, then Oxy-Acetylene, and finally MIG. I took to it pretty easily, and when he got a proper shop for his new business venture of building ATVs and single-seat dune buggies, we built the metal benches together. He designed them and cut the tubing and let me do the welding. At their house in Hesperia, California, he and my stepmother Linda converted the large two-car garage into a workshop, with half devoted to woodworking and the other to metal. And just as before, the workbenches were the centerpieces. Certain things were too big and had to be done on the floor, but by and large, the benches were where the making happened. When they sold the house we had in Lake Havasu, Arizona, they bought some land in the desert and had a new house built. On the two-and-a-half-acre property, Dad built a 40x40-foot workshop. It was the biggest and most well-stocked workshop he would ever own, and just as it was with every other garage or workshop, the benches were the centerpieces. There were three of them — large, metal, and on locking industrial casters — and we built them together. In addition to the benches, there was a hydraulic lift, a custom-built paint station with a vacuum table, a 4x8-foot CNC plasma cutter, welders, saws, drill presses, a giant compressor that fed air to stations around the shop for all of the hand tools, and pretty much anything else you could think of that a shop could or should have. In fact, he had so many tools and so much equipment that when he died, Linda donated all of it to a school in nearby Kingman, where they were able to start a new metalworking and fabrication program.
As you can hopefully see, the workbench has always been more than just the sum of its wood or steel component parts — it’s been the foundation for making, at least in my family. And when I told Adrianne that I would make my own benches and build out a studio space on day one, I really did mean it. The problem is, all of the baggage surrounding the significance of the workbenches, including comments like “artists are a dime a dozen” (which I heard often) and whether or not I could live up to the weight of the expectations that I imposed on them came along too. For a few years, I used a folding table that we found at an estate sale, putting it up and taking it down as the spirit moved me to paint, which wasn’t as often as I had hoped, but that’s another story. I’ve said for a long time that I really am happiest when I’m making — and that could mean painting or drawing, writing, taking photographs, or just plunking around on one of my synthesizers. There’s a reason that I call my podcast Process Driven. Despite the lack of new episodes in a very long time (which I am in the midst of addressing), that’s really what I am. I love process in all its forms, and not just my own. In fact, I’m probably the least interested in my own processes because they are so familiar to me, which is why I love talking with other people about theirs. So the benches, despite seeming like a simple add, have actually been much more difficult to implement than I thought they would be, and I think that being in therapy for the past nine months or so has really helped me develop new tools to help get over the stuff around expectations and finally build them. Plus, we recently had a new roof done on the house and the roofers left behind several sheets of plywood, which I ended up using as the bench tops. So the running joke is that these benches cost $15,065 — $65 for the 2x4s and $15K for the plywood.
I don’t know whether it’s the therapy or that the pain of not having workbenches in the studio finally became greater than the pain of actually taking the risk and building them — or maybe it was some combination of the two. But seeing them in the studio was much more of a relief than it was a source of worry or concern about living up to some imaginary expectation that I had attached to them. In fact, I just stood there for a moment, looking at them — waiting for the wave of anxiety to throw me into some sort of tailspin, but it never came. What did come were feelings of excitement around what I could do with them that I hadn’t been able to do without them. They weren’t complicated, but I took my time, measured twice, cut once, and they turned out great. I even think that my dad would approve, which is what a lot of this story is about. The workbenches were exactly what I needed to make the space more or less complete, at least functionally, and now that it is, all I’ve been thinking about is possibility. Since I finished the workbenches, I’ve started and finished two new paintings, I’ve ordered a dozen small cradled panels, and I’ll be building some larger panels next week.
This morning, my therapist noted how my energy changed when I was telling her about all of this and she asked me why finishing the benches seems to have inspired all of this creative energy. I told her that I thought it was two things. Number one was realizing that the anxiety I felt for years over the benches was ultimately much ado about nothing. I had built them up in my head as some sort of mountain that I had to ascend, or some sort of imaginary hurdle that I had to jump in order to “earn” being creative and living an artistic life. Neither of which turned out to be true, of course — especially the part about earning an artistic life. The other thing was that I’m finally able to distinguish between value and worth when it comes to what I make. I’ve used the two terms interchangeably for years — and maybe you have too — but the fact is that they are very different. Value is personal and refers to the importance or usefulness of something to the individual. It’s an internal measure, whereas worth is external and typically refers to the monetary value of something, which is largely outside of our control. For example, the two (soon to be three) paintings that I’ve been working on over the past couple weeks have value to me regardless of whether or not they sell. I’ve learned more about materials, made insights about composition, and tried techniques that will make their way into future work — all of which mean more to me than the transactional value of what they are worth to a potential buyer. Don’t get me wrong, if any of my work resonates with you, I would love to sell it to you. I can’t say what my work is worth, which is why I find pricing it so difficult — that’s largely the decision of the market. What I can do is decide (or maybe realize) how much value I get from the doing. In that realization, I’m starting to see myself in a different light, which is pretty terrific.
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Thanks for reading.
If you’re a photographer (or know someone who is), check out my book Photography by the Letter. It’s got more than 250 terms defined and explained through dozens of original diagrams and photos. There are also tips, exercises, Q&As, and interviews with 10 terrific photographers. It’s available in print or as a downloadable PDF.