Feeling Our Way Around Forgeries

 Most families have a horsethief or two in their histories, but we just have forgery in our closet.  My dad first told us that my grandfather, Thorsten (which means “Thor’s Stone”, which suggests that the ‘real’ “Thor’s Hammer” was not what we think of as one, but just an old stone; a reverse  knock-off, honestly)  over from Sweden after carving  a copy of the “royal barge” for the king;

 

 was  running from a business destroyed by alcoholism ; not his but his brother’s; his business partner.  The business: making duplicates of ‘ priceless’ antiques; read: the 6th Louis Catorce dining chair to match and fill out the other five already in existence and crying out for the full set to achieve the primo price. Oddly, my first unwitting, of course, foray into the ‘family business’ (which I only discovered years after I was already an established furniture maker) ,was making “Taos Beds”; well, to be honest, everyone made them in those halcyon days of the mid seventies, as they were going like hotcakes.  Only one problem; it was Taos Furniture or some such (different stories out there) that “invented” them, although my grandmother  (on the other side) said they were just “Morris Chairs”.  I often get people who want something they have already seen somewhere and  I try to make a little change to keep honest, but, frankly, it is sometimes hard not to copy a little.  I have also been copied and  mostly consider it a sort of compliment; on a good day.  The guy I learned from came up with all these designs; cool ones with lots of detail and he was so proud.  Finally I discovered that he had a (tum tum dum tum); book (that he took his ‘original’ designs from).  These kinds of stories go on and on.  Just the other day,  I was asked to take a picture of a gate so that I could make some woodwork based on it.  I often “google”  (a legitimate real word now) anything that I want to represent and take the best twenty or so pictures from  “images” and then  paste them  into Microsoft Word and use them to help create the final piece.  Hey; it works!

 So, there is something, though, that needs to be paid attention to and I think it rallies around the word “authenticity;, so  what does it look like?  If you take a bucket of water from a trout stream, or  you dam it up to make a lake, you do not have a trout stream.; a trout stream is only a trout stream when it is flowing between its own two banks, at its own pace, in its own sweet way (language borrowed from The River Why).  Or like the lyrics: “You know all the words and you sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song she sang, you never quite learned  the song…”  So, there are subtleties here, like talking about love, quality and they involve the dynamics of us peoples’ eyes; you see, we, most of us, have the ability to notice the most minute details like whether the edges of a piece of furniture is planed, sanded, routered, chiseled or left alone.  People like Bernard Ewell, fine art appraiser, neighbor and  one of the more interesting people in the world, who has a refined eye for detail and can often just feel that there is something wrong with a forged, say, Dali piece and then takes it from there.  There is a lot at stake here and  that  is why he wrote a soon-to- be- released book, Artful Dodgers: Fraud and Foolishness in the Art Market.  The issue is ubiquitous and Bernard says that Thomas Hoving of the Metropolitan  Museum of Art  said that  “40 percent of all pieces offered  to him for display are forgeries”!!  So; Buyer Beware; but that is not enough; for instance, right here in our neck of the woods are three businesses (Bobcat Bite, The Legal Tender, Santa Fe Southern)  that  self-define authenticity and probably cannot be replaced; once they are gone, with all of their characteristics; good natured attitude, sense of honor, sense of place, sense of esthetics, mysterious ingredients that make the heart soar; it takes some magic to make anything successful and it is hard, if not impossible, to duplicate.  This not ‘paint by the numbers’, folks, and do not be fooled by cheap imitations…..or expensive ones!  As Bernard’s ‘motto’ goes:  If a (person) has integrity nothing else matters; if a (person) does not have integrity nothing else matters.