Furniture as art at The Fells
Running through mid-October, “Summer at The Fells” is an exhibition of work from more than a dozen members of New Hampshire Furniture Masters. Held at the John Hay Estate, it’s an event that should be attended more than once, as new pieces will be coming and going in the coming months. Many items will be available for purchase.
The venue befits the display. It was built in 1892 for John and Clara Hay as a place to summer — when that was a verb. The 83.5-acre property includes the 22-room Colonial Revival mansion, along with forest trails, lush gardens and shorelines. It is the only early 20th-century summer estate on Lake Sunapee that’s still intact and open to the public.
Some of the pieces on display were done by Ted Blachly, who’s been a Furniture Masters member since its inception in 1995. Blachly’s past work includes a sensuously curved chest made of curly sugar maple and rosewood, created in 2014 for the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester.
In a recent phone interview, Blachly said the makers at the Fells event range across several disciplines, like Dan Faya, who taught at the traditionally based North Bennet Street School in Boston. “He’s an expert carver, and his work is very clean,” Blachly said. “He has a chair up there that looks like an antique shield-backed chair, the carvings, that’s where his roots are.”
A distinctive room divider from relatively new member Lynn Szymanski blurs the line between form and function. “She has a more sculptural approach to making work,” Blachly said, “It’s a take on a three-panel screen that might be used in an old antique farmhouse; it has that feel about it. There’s a saw blade integrated in the top sections of the frame, and it’s kind of an interesting piece.”
Blachly began his road to furniture making in the early 1970s.
“It was during the back-to-the-land movement,” he said. “I fell into working on old houses with two really fussy carpenters, and I learned a lot. They saw that I had patience [so] they would often give me a fussy job or a pain-in-the-ass job, because they knew I would stick with it or work my way through it…. Having to solve odd problems, I think, really sort of helped me along.”
The following decade, he became part of a guild that included 17 furniture makers who would meet and discuss their work, and through that he met Jere Osgood, one of New Hampshire Furniture Masters’ founders. Osgood died last year.
“He was a world-renowned figure in the studio furniture field, a teacher and a very innovative maker,” Blachly said. “I ended up assisting him in his shop on an as-needed basis in 1993. I would go down there and help him with runs of chairs. Working for him at that level, I learned so much. It was a really wonderful part of my life. I stayed closely connected to him right up until he died. I worked on his stuff. I feel fortunate to have had that experience.”
Blachly’s Currier Chest is a testament to the painstaking discipline at his level of furniture making. From the initial curator outreach to completion, the elaborate piece took well over a year to finish. Made of sugar maple, Bolivian rosewood, white oak, quarter-sawn red maple and Sitka spruce, the piece is part of the Currier’s permanent collection.
“That was quite a woodworking adventure,” he said. “Through my work with Jere Osgood … his pieces are very sculptural with lots of curves — I had learned how to articulate and figure things with full-scale drawings and mock-ups [and] for that Currier chest I took it pretty far [and] a lot of the techniques or ways of figuring out how to do something was learning this stuff from Jere. It’s not something where you just take some wood and start hacking away and sawing away and get that. There’s all this other work that has to go in so you can build it.”
Summer at The Fells – NH Furniture Masters
When: Daily through Friday, Oct. 12, with a House Party on Thursday, Aug. 8, from 4 to 6 p.m.
Where: John Hay Estate at The Fells, 456 Route 103A, Newbury
More: Free, register at eventbrite.com
Featured image: Currier Chest by Ted Blachly. Courtesy photo.
