Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America
Interview with Jere Osgood
Conducted by Donna Gold
At the Artist's home in Wilton, New Hampshire
September 19 and October 8, 2001
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Jere Osgood on September 19 and October 8, 2001. The interview took place in Wilton, New Hampshire, and was conducted by Donna Gold for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.
Jere Osgood and Donna Gold have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a verbatim transcript of spoken, rather than written prose.
Interview
MS. DONNA GOLD: This is Donna Gold interviewing Jere Osgood at his home in Wilton, New Hampshire, on September 19, 2001, tape one, side one. So just tell me, you were born in Staten Island.
MR. JERE OSGOOD: Staten Island, New York.
MS. GOLD: And the date?
MR. OSGOOD: February 7, 1936.
MS. GOLD: And you were raised in Staten Island, right.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah.
MS. GOLD: I was wondering whether you felt that you had the -- well, did you go into Manhattan frequently?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, yeah.
MS. GOLD: Were you influenced by the architecture and style?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I realize that I was, and it’s hard to put it into words. It’s a very big city, and you come to expect the scale of things there. And so, it’s the architecture, the music, the museums, the scale of all that is tremendous. And after a while, I really didn’t like the city too much. I was glad to leave Staten Island. But then, as the years go by, I realize that it sort of set the feeling for me. It’s not that every place else in the world is second; it’s hard to explain it.
You really have to have lived there to understand everything is on a large scale, whether it be dimensional things like building, or whether it be music, or things you’re into in museums. And I like that; I like having that to reflect back on. But yes, I did go over to the city a lot. It was a fairly short trip across on the ferry.
MS. GOLD: Did you live within view of the skyline?
MR. OSGOOD: No, we lived fairly close to the water, but we couldn’t see the skyline. It was close enough so I could hear the foghorns and the ships going by. There was an aunt that lived closer to where the ferry docked and up very high, and I used to like to go to her place, because there I could see the whole harbor and see the ships coming. When I was really small, I really liked that. She had binoculars, so I could entertain myself for a long time watching things.
MS. GOLD: And that would have been in the middle of World War II. Were ships coming in and out of –
MR. OSGOOD: It would have been before, during, and after, yeah. I remember that a lot for odd reasons that struck me at my age level. I mean, there were always relatives coming by to stay with us that were in either the army, the navy, the coast guard, or whatever. If they had a day’s leave or something, they’d come over and visit us, because being in New York, they had a lot of the military. And then, the other odd thing is, like there was shortages of everything, sugar. I used to let my uncle -- I always gave him my sugar portion.
MS. GOLD: You did.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I didn’t eat much sugar. And then, I remember the other thing during the war, my father couldn’t get gasoline for his car, and he discovered that it would run on cleaning fluid. So on Saturday mornings, we’d drive around and pickup odd gallons of cleaning fluid so we could use the car. They don’t make engines like that now. They’re a little more sensitive, I think.
MS. GOLD: How amazing. Did he keep trying fluids, or did somebody tell him that?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, he was sort of mechanically inclined. He used to work on cars. I mean, I think he sort of figured that out. The chemicals like that, gasoline, paint thinner, and so forth, they all run in a scale of volatility -- I can’t remember what it’s called. I think other people know it too.
MS. GOLD: I’ve never heard of that. That’s great. So he was the son of an architect?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, my grandfather was an architect, yeah.
MS. GOLD: And what kind of work did your grandfather do?
MR. OSGOOD: He was a stone architect. In other words, he specialized in work with stone. And he just worked within a larger firm. I don’t think he actually designed any buildings himself, but he was one of the -- it’s a team that usually does work on buildings. So I was always hearing all these great stories from him, be sure to visit Grand Central Station and some post office -- that I’ve forgotten the name of now -- and the big railroad station in Washington; I believe he worked on that.
MS. GOLD: That’s Union Station, isn’t it?
MR. OSGOOD: As I say, he wasn’t one of the designers, but they had to have a team of skilled people to take over. And at that time, he lived in Vermont, because he worked at one of the major quarries in Vermont where the stone would have been cut.
MS. GOLD: Would that have been Barre?
MR. OSGOOD: It could be; I’d have to look at a map. They lived in Northfield, which may be near Barre. So he was an architect. That was the reason I went to architectural school. I decided I would study to be an architect. Well, I may be getting ahead of your questions, but anyway, that was why that followed through, that I went to study architecture. I soon realized -- well, it took me three years almost to figure out that I was more interested in the detail work on the interiors of buildings, in other words, the furniture. They did ask us to draw in furniture and interior shots.
So I felt more comfortable with that scale rather than the large scale of the buildings that I was designing. So I left there and went to the School for American Craftsmen, at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology].
MS. GOLD: I do want to ask you about that in a little bit, but I was just wondering, it seems like you have sort of a line of craftspeople in your family. Your grandfather was an architect and your father did a lot of woodworking.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, he had his own workshop in the basement where I, of course, worked as soon as I could walk around.
MS. GOLD: Really, I mean, were you very, very young?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh yeah, I was making things when I was really small. But this was true of everybody in the family. We’d go to visit anybody, the first thing my father and I would do, we’d have to go see what they were making in their shop. That’s just true of the whole family. That’s the way it was.
MS. GOLD: Was it both sides of the family?
MR. OSGOOD: No, not my mother’s, my father’s side. My mother’s family was from the South, and so we weren’t visiting them. I never went South with my mother. But all these relatives that I used to go to, none of them were doing this professionally. Nobody did. My father did eventually start selling some things, and he liked doing upholstery or re-upholstery, so he did that for friends. It wasn’t really a business, but he did. And he turned things for a shop in New York City. He did quite a bit of work for them, actually, in his spare time.
MS. GOLD: What was his job?
MR. OSGOOD: He was an industrial traffic manager, which means when you’re -- it’s an awful job, but it’s a very responsible job. When you’re in a large factory making things, then they have to be, somebody is in charge of planning the route and the trucking to where they are supposed to go for manufacturing, re-manufacturing. And so that was what he was doing, he was organizing all of that. And he never liked his work at all, and I’ve said more than once that that was one of the reasons why I stuck to what I wanted to do, because he indirectly told me how to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.
And I know I said to myself many times, I didn’t like the idea that he was very unhappy with what he did. So I liked making things out of wood, and I did very well at this school there in Rochester. And there’s a career. But I was really ignoring, to a big extent, whether I could make a living from it. And I didn’t care. It may have been at the right time for that; you see, that would have been the sixties. It was a more romantic notion to do what you wanted to do, but it was also part of my makeup at the time.
It wasn’t easy then, and it isn’t any easier now to make a living making furniture or related wooden things. But, as I say, it started with my early years there. And actually, I remember the enthusiasm my grandfather had for what he was doing, but when I knew him, he had long ago retired. The age difference was broad there. He was elderly when I was getting to be 14, or 15, or 16. And he worked in his little shop all the time, but not doing a lot.
MS. GOLD: Was he making wood things too?
MR. OSGOOD: He did mostly turned things, and he did some smaller things. But it was always interesting talking to him of the different woods he was getting in and that he was working with, and the differences between them. And I remember that now. At the time, it didn’t make much of an impression on me that, oh, this is a really hard wood, and this one is very aromatic, and this one tools easily. And that’s what we talk about now.
MS. GOLD: So your grandfather created this sort of generation of kids who loved to work in wood, and that came down. I mean, do you see that as a generational line, or am I imposing that?
MR. OSGOOD: No. I think what I inherited was an interest in, I guess you’d say, dimensional things rather than mind things, because I think in pictures and think in three dimensions, rather than thinking in words. But that seems to be the case. So I inherited all of these, what would you call them, physical traits that would help me; in other words, a person that works with his hands. And my grandfather was also, I think, sort of a mathematical wizard or genius, but I can’t say that I am. My son inherited that. Maybe it shifts to other generations.
MS. GOLD: But you also have this very familiar, I mean, woodworking is just a familiar thing. That’s what everybody did.
MR. OSGOOD: Everybody made things, yeah, at varying degrees of complexity, big pieces, small pieces. My father’s brother made some very large pieces, I think, most of them after he retired. But he was doing some pretty elaborate work.
MS. GOLD: Making what kinds of things?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, cabinets. And I can remember him one time saying that somebody wanted to make a piece like Nakashima had made. It was either a chest or a large sideboard; I can’t remember exactly now. But he did things like that. But another interesting thing, and I think I’ve said it before, is it was a sort of family ethic, and I don’t know whether it is the way the family was being New Englanders, or whether it was because of the 1929 recession. Because in the family, there was always this, if you didn’t say it, you could feel it. If you want something, you make it. So go down to the basement and make it in your shop, and it extended to anything or everything. You repaired things, or you made things work, or you made new things.
So I grew up with that as a concept, and so I think that’s a good lead in for anybody that’s going to be designing, to have that as a thing lingering in the background. Maybe you know: is that a New England ethic or is it --
MS. GOLD: I’m a New Yorker. [Laughs.]
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, you wouldn’t know. Even though I grew up in New York, everybody there [family members], they considered themselves New England. Some of them had really heavy accents that were accents from around here, Boston, or New Hampshire, or whatever.
MS. GOLD: So where did your father grow up?
MR. OSGOOD: In Northfield, Vermont. And then, when he was in his third or last year of high school, they moved to New York City. So he always said he was from Vermont. See, that’s where his father was working.
MS. GOLD: And how many children were in his family?
MR. OSGOOD: In his family, there were seven. I have a lot of cousins as a result of that.
MS. GOLD: And you’re an only child.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I’m an only child.
MS. GOLD: What were the things that you were making as a young boy?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, it’s hard to say. I made boxes. I did make a lot of my own toys.
MS. GOLD: Oh, really.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, various kinds of boats and cars. I’d go down to the basement, and I remember making one that took a CO2 cartridge, and that was kind of exciting. It would go shooting along the water.
MS. GOLD: [Laughs.] That was a boat.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. And then, as I got older, probably 12 or 14, there’s a workbench in the other room that I made about that time. I know I made things for my bedroom, for my room, you know, bookcases, or desk area, or cabinets. I mean, that seemed like just a natural thing. I mean, I just did it. I needed those things for my room. So it was mostly practical things. Well, when you were younger, toys would have been a practical thing, but as you got older, bookcases or things like that would come along there.
At that point, you see, I wasn’t planning on studying making furniture. I was thinking I was going to study architecture, so I did spend a lot of time making drawings. My grandfather had given me a lot of his drafting equipment and told me I had to practice, and practice, and practice. So I just copied various drawings of things out of books or magazines. For some reason, I thought that was an interesting thing to do. I don’t know why.
MS. GOLD: This was as a teenager.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I was just doing mechanical drawings. Looking back on that now, it doesn’t seem a very interesting thing to do, but I did it anyway.
MS. GOLD: So as a child, you were really gaining vocabulary and skills that you needed, extraordinarily.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, that’s what I was doing. I think that was very important. I mean, if I look back on it, it all fell into place later. The other side, I guess you’d call it my being in New York -- we were talking about that before -- both my mother and my aunt took turns taking me places. This is when I was really small. I can remember going to the 1939 World’s Fair and being very impressed with the buildings. I still remember the forms of the buildings. But I can also remember that I thought there was a man down in the grating in the ground because there was a voice coming out of it.
And so, I would have been three years old, but I still remember that the forms of the buildings made an impression on me, as well as this funny business with my mother saying, “No, there isn’t a man down there in the grating,” and I kept looking. But then they also, starting at three, four, or whatever, kept taking me to museums. My mother was taking me to the -- you know, New York City is famous for its museums. And I liked that for some reason. I liked looking at these things.
I really liked the, when I was smaller, I really liked the Egyptian section of the Met, [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City] so we’d spend a lot of time there. She took care of that aspect of my life, then my Aunt Emma took me to music, the opera and concerts. I can’t remember her ever taking me to a museum, but she was always getting tickets for this or that. She was a very unusual person in that she traveled somewhere every year.
MS. GOLD: On her own.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. So we’d always get these stories of where she had been and where she was going. And every year, she took a long trip, but then, she lived on Staten Island near us. So as I say, I got an education from her, the way an Aunt Emma can do it. And then, my mother from the other angle there.
MS. GOLD: Did your mother work?
MR. OSGOOD: Yes, my mother was a pharmacist. When she went to school and when she worked, they had a much wider education than they do now. She did other lab work also and what would be called a compounding pharmacist now that can make up medications from the raw ingredients. So I was always asking her questions, anything related to chemistry, inorganic or organic, or anything in between. She was very knowledgeable.
Her father had studied to be a doctor, but his health -- I mean, his eyes failed and so forth. So he had a pharmacy, and they were called the chemists then, so she grew up with that and became a pharmacist. That seems a little foreign to me. I’ve never had any inclination to go into that field. There were a lot of nurses in the family, and her mother was a nurse in the Civil War, or the end of it. So my mother would always be able to answer any medical questions.
MS. GOLD: That’s useful.
MR. OSGOOD: Very useful, yeah.
MS. GOLD: Did you find yourself reading magazines too, and looking at style?
MR. OSGOOD: You mean, when I was younger?
MS. GOLD: When you were younger, yeah.
MR. OSGOOD: Yes, I liked the things like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, and then, I think it was called Wildlife magazine. Yeah, I think that’s what it was called. So I liked that.
MS. GOLD: And you spent vacations in Vermont.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah.
MS. GOLD: Long vacations, or just --
MR. OSGOOD: No, no, it was every year; it was two weeks we’d go up, and mostly to go fishing. And my father really lived for those vacations, and it was very important to me. You thought about the two weeks all year. And even though it was only two weeks, he really liked it. But it was really great, because if it was raining or something, we’d visit other places that he knew of in Vermont. It was a good time.
The interesting thing, though, after he died, I’ve never had any real interest in fishing. And it seemed to be it was more time together rather than fishing. And I didn’t think about that at the time.
MS. GOLD: So you must have had a very close family.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I guess you’d say that, yeah.
MS. GOLD: And I guess I read somewhere that you were in an academic field in high school, even though you had this great mechanical interest and fascination.
MR. OSGOOD: Yes, I couldn’t take a typing class because I was on the academic track.
MS. GOLD: And had you any desire to take shop, or was that just something you did after school?
MR. OSGOOD: I couldn’t do that either, because that was for the people that weren’t going on to college.
MS. GOLD: And you were going on to college.
MR. OSGOOD: Yes. When you’re in high school in New York City, they have you -- I don’t know what they do now -- but you’re categorized, academic track or not.
MS. GOLD: Did you go to school in Staten Island?
MR. OSGOOD: High school? Yeah.
MS. GOLD: And it was clear early on in your teenage years that you were going to be going into architecture.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. Well, it’d be the same as now. I mean, you start thinking about it at the end of your third year because you’re supposed to be starting the paperwork. Yeah, I pretty much made up my mind then that that’s what I was going to do.
MS. GOLD: So it was sort of doing the academic track of building, in a sense. You weren’t going to actually build things with your hands as an architect, but you were going to --
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, as an architect, you wouldn’t be building with your hands. That may be another reason why I’m better suited for making furniture, because I like working with my hands. And you see, if I had stayed in an architectural firm –
MS. GOLD: -- If you had stayed on an architectural course you would have been working in an architectural firm.
[Audio break. Tape change.]
MR. OSGOOD: I didn’t like the way the architecture school was going. I was at the University of Illinois, and they didn’t stay with residential work very long, which I liked. It shifted over into larger commercial buildings, and I wasn’t as interested in doing airports, heliports, and things. And that wasn’t the major reason why I decided to stop and study furniture making, but I didn’t see that as a very interesting future. I was thinking, well, I would have to go back and re-study the work with residential work if I was going to continue with this -- I mean, going to another architectural school.
MS. GOLD: Now, when you stopped, had you known anybody who was a furniture maker or who was a craftsperson?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I just saw an advertisement for the School of American Craftsmen at RIT, to study furniture design and making. And I don’t think, at that point -- it would have been sensible probably to talk to my father’s brother who had more experience making furniture than my father did at that point, but it didn’t occur to me.
MS. GOLD: It didn’t.
MR. OSGOOD: No, I just made that decision on my own.
MS. GOLD: Did anybody turn around in shock and horror that you --
MR. OSGOOD: Oh yeah, they thought it was kind of odd that I would stop a career of architecture to -- furniture making was a little questionable. But I just read that between the lines.
MS. GOLD: Oh really, nobody actually said, “How could you leave this program in the third year?”
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, no one ever actually said it. The one that was most encouraging was my mother. She thought that if I felt this was a better thing for me to do, then I should do it. I think she also had feelings about the fact that my father really didn’t like his work and that I’d really better pick out a career that I liked. I don’t think she said that in those words, but she was definitely encouraging about, yes, if you want to switch, switch.
The family didn’t have much money, so my continuing on, they could send me a little money, but not much. And so, they said I had to get a scholarship. So I did, I applied for them, and I managed to get them. And I think they were able to send me enough money to cover rental and food, but not tuition. I was able to get scholarships for the time I was at the American Craftsmen.
MS. GOLD: So this was in the late '50s, right.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, it would have been late '50s.
MS. GOLD: Were you also on a scholarship to the University of Illinois?
MR. OSGOOD: No. At that point, I was relying more on my academic skills, which I’m not up in the upper parts of any high school class.
MS. GOLD: So you had to pay for tuition.
MR. OSGOOD: Oh yeah, it was a struggle for me. I’m one of these people that get mostly grade C with the occasional B, and I did well enough in enough things so I was able to go on to college, but nowhere near the top of my class.
MS. GOLD: So they already had been struggling sending you to college.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah.
MS. GOLD: What kind of program was this at RIT?
MR. OSGOOD: I entered as an undergraduate.
MS. GOLD: As a first year undergraduate.
MR. OSGOOD: I don’t know that I could figure that out. Because they looked at all my background from architectural school and they just lumped things together. So I did four years of credit in three, and actually, I was finished before the three years was up. I had already put three years in-in architectural school, so they transferred a whole lot of stuff in and gave me credit for it. So I didn’t have to take as many academic subjects.
So consequently, I did very well in the upper parts of my class, design classes and things like that. The classes in furniture making, I got excellent grades in. But then, I distinctly remember a logic class I had to take and by some miracle managed to survive that with, what is it, I think D-plus they’ll record as a grade and you can still graduate. I’m a waste of time in things like that because I have no concept of logic the way it’s understood by the rest of the world, and it was very evident in that setting.
I also took public speaking, which I did better than logic, but not too much better. Looking back on that now, I recommend anybody take public speaking, because if you accidentally have to start teaching, it’s good to have that background.
MS. GOLD: When you were either at Illinois or RIT, did you begin to think of designing as an exciting thing to do?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I did. One of the things that architectural school did for me is they, in the course of the instruction and the classes, and so forth, they set up a system for designing. And I can’t really explain the system to you easily, but it’s meant to lead you through the initial concept, sketching, and then elaborating on the sketches and then the actual finished architectural drawing.
And when I left architectural school, I knew this was a really good way to think and everything. And when I got to the School for American Craftsmen at RIT, I was able to use that. And that really helped me move faster than I would have otherwise, and I could see the difference with the other students there. They didn’t have a step-by-step procedure for working through a thought to a sketch, to a loose design, to finalizing it, and then, in the case of the School for American Craftsmen, you would actually build it. See, in architectural school, you didn’t do that. So it was exciting. I worked my way into that very easily, and it did workout very well.
MS. GOLD: When you were working at home before you went off to college, were you creating your own designs? Were they innovative designs, or were they --
MR. OSGOOD: No, I was, but we didn’t use the word design. [Laughs.] Things happened and you made them. Nobody in the family would know what the word meant, really. We didn’t talk that way; we didn’t talk about designing or whatever. It’s kind of funny.
MS. GOLD: So can you recall an early unusual piece that you made as a teenager?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I don’t think there are any. No, I just made things. As I said before, toys, and then later on, practical things like bookcases, or cabinets, or things for my room. This incidentally led to getting work around the neighborhood. People discovered I could do this, and so I can remember a friend of mine -- you know, it was a friend of my mother’s -- asked me if I could rebuild this bookcase in a smaller scale, in other words, take all the parts out of it.
It was a built-in bookcase, and I had to take it apart and then reassemble it as a freestanding bookcase, smaller. So I brought all this stuff, parts back to the family basement, and I probably was only about 14. And it had all these funny moldings on the top and stuff, but it was quite big; it was like six foot by six-foot or something. And I distinctly remember, when I was done with it, I delivered it to her on my sled. It was winter, so I went hauling this sled up the street. And there wouldn’t have been any other way of getting it to her; I mean, nobody in the family had a truck. And then, she found somebody to help me carry it in.
Then, at the same time, there were other kitchen rebuild things around the neighborhood. So as word got out that I would fix things or rebuild parts of kitchens, they were calling me. Later on, in my summers between school, I got jobs doing whole kitchens and things like that, which I suppose are a good lead-in to making good furniture, because it got me started buying a few more tools, which I still have today that I bought in the early '50s, I guess -- old stuff now.
MS. GOLD: Yeah, they’re getting to be antique. So were you working for yourself, then, or did you ever work for a company?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I never did. I always worked for myself.
MS. GOLD: Then you must have gotten a good sense of finish.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah.
MS. GOLD: So as a teenager, that’s what you did in your spare time.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I repaired things and built things for people, yeah.
MS. GOLD: And did it help you go through school? I mean, did you use that money?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, when I was younger there, I had a tropical fish collection, so I spent probably a lot of my money on that, or I was buying tools. Later on, when I had transferred out of architectural school, at that point, I was doing a lot of work. This store in New York City that my father had discovered called America House, which is, anybody that’s my age or older knows about --
MS. GOLD: Was that on 6th Avenue?
MR. OSGOOD: It was on 53rd Street, I think.
MS. GOLD: Near the Museum of Modern Art.
MR. OSGOOD: It used to be east of the Museum of Modern Art, but it moved to sort of across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. But anyway, in its earlier version, my father did work for them, then I started doing work for them. And when I went to RIT, I was doing production work for them, bookends, bookends, and more bookends. And I used to hide them under my workbench and work on them evenings, just polishing them back in my room, and all sorts of stuff. So I made a lot of extra money as a student.
MS. GOLD: Oh, you were using the studios to make things.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I’d work evenings at the school.
MS. GOLD: Sort of sneak it in between assignments.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I’d sneak it in sideways. When my teacher left, I’d pull it out and work on them. I made, in my first ten years there, millions of small things.
MS. GOLD: Were the bookends a particular design?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, in those early years -- I don’t have one here -- the ones I did, they were walnut bookends and they had a tile inserted in the face, so I had to rout it out and glue in a ceramic tile. The tiles had designs on them.
MS. GOLD: Where were the tiles from?
MR. OSGOOD: The store had another craftsman that made them.
MS. GOLD: Did the store design the bookends?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I designed them. They relied on me for that. Yeah, they were very, very nice. They were drawings of animals. And later on, I did some other ones that had ceramic -- I at one point studied ceramics to a small degree, so I had glazed pieces that inserted in the face of a block. So I did hundreds of those too, and this is while I was a student. Oh, we made paperweights too. It was a block of wood about two by three, three by three. It had a copper disk that was enameled with a design.
They had the idea that if they combined two craftsmen, they could present a unique product to the public. That made some sense, and so they were sending me enamels and then ceramic tiles that I had to insert in these blocks. And as I say, I earned money from that while I was a student, but then I continued probably through the sixties, about a ten-year period. You know, I left New York and moved to Connecticut and got a shop there. And in those days, really, all you needed to make was about $1,000 a month. I mean, I did it.
MS. GOLD: You did it with bookends.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, and other small things like letter holders, bookends, and little boxes.
MS. GOLD: Was America House later the American Craft Association Store?
MR. OSGOOD: No. There is a store there now in the museum, but that’s the museum shop. America House itself closed I don’t know how many years ago -- 20, 25 years ago, sometime ago. As I say, they were east of 5th Avenue, then they moved west so that they were on the same street as the Museum of Modern Art.
MS. GOLD: I remember it as a child.
MR. OSGOOD: If you were in New York, you’d probably remember it. But it was the only place that had work by craftsmen, except the Appalachian Handcraft Guild. And I used to go there with my mother because she liked those things, and she explained to me that these were made by people, they weren’t made in factories. That was in a street of shops that’s in Radio City that leads to the skating rink, those expensive little shops there. And the Appalachian Handcraft Guild was there for years. I mean, as long as I can remember, it was always there. And they deserve credit for keeping the Appalachians alive and well.
MS. GOLD: Did you have things like that around your house, or were there things mostly that your family made?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, my mother had very good taste; she did get some things there.
MS. GOLD: So I read somewhere that you used to work on these bookends and things in the dark. You had to keep the woodworking shop lights off, sort of clandestine.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I’ve mentioned that before. I used to lock the fixed lock on the machine room door at the school, when I was at the School for American Craftsmen. I used to fix the locks so that when the custodian locked everything up for the night that it wouldn’t lock properly. And I could get into work in the workbench room, where we could work by hand in the evening. But when I came back, I would go in the machine room and not turn on the lights, because if I did, the security guards outside would see it. Now, why they didn’t hear the machinery running, I don’t know, but nobody every caught me. [Laughs.]
Yeah, there were two ways to go in: I had to either put tape or pieces of wood in the lock in that door on the main floor, but then there was another way in. I had to climb over a partition and then climb up a trap door, and that was a little harder to do -- that was meant for transferring wood.
MS. GOLD: Well, I was wondering whether that gave you a more -- whether you gained anything from working in the dark, a more intuitive sense of the material.
MR. OSGOOD: No, no, I’m just lucky I didn’t cut my fingers off. [Laughs.] No, I wouldn’t say I did this all the time, but I know I did it enough. It was really kind of stupid, I suppose.
MS. GOLD: So I wonder if you can remember when you first realized that you were making designs, that you were making original pieces, and when it first got exciting for you?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, that would have been in the early years with America House, that I was the designer. But at that point, you see, I had already given myself the blessing of having been to architectural school, where you would have been taught how to design. But, yes, I was getting the idea that yes, I was designing these things and they were selling. So I don’t know if that clarifies it too much, but there was sort of a point there.
MS. GOLD: And was it something that you really cherished?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I considered it a practical skill, and I didn’t look at it as anything other than just a practical thing. It just goes back to my family ethic of, if you want something, make it. And whether this was actually a good design or not, I mean, it wasn’t the question. Well, it’s only as I’ve gotten older, and older, and older, and my things have sold well, and I’ve got work now in I don’t know how many, several museum collections, that it finally dawned on me that, well yes, I guess I am doing all right as a designer.
But in the early years, that wouldn’t have been a thought at all. I mean, that’s the way you did it. Somebody wants something, you do it. That was the way I approached making things for the store in New York City, for America House. And they expected me to design them. They weren’t going to give me any designs. And it’s sort of just a standard thing: well, we’ll see how it sells. And if you think you can make it for a low enough price for us to sell it, then we’ll carry on from there.
MS. GOLD: And your father was also working?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, he was making things for the store also.
MS. GOLD: What was he making?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, he made turned things. And one of the interesting things that he did was a chess set, and that he did design. It was one that they had at the store, and the person had made two sets for them and then had gone back to Hungary, or wherever he was from, so they asked my father if he would like to make it. And a lot of it was turned, so he thought this was great. He didn’t have the idea that he would want to design it. He did salt and pepper shakers for the store also, turned things like that.
And as I say, that was one of the first things I did for them was turn bowls. And I remember distinctly, I used to make the bowls on parabolic and catenary curves, because I liked these curves. From architectural school, you know, you’re given a lot of assorted math classes. You have to. It amounted to an engineering degree. So you see these rounded forms, and so I was just using them at a small scale.
MS. GOLD: But that’s almost foreshadowing your work now with the interesting curves that you use.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, but the difference there, I was looking at that as, well, if it use a pure mathematical form, it will be really accepted as a good piece. And now, I realize that we as people can make irrational decisions when we’re curving a line, and it’s these irrational, subtle things that really make a big difference. They may make a piece look like, yes, this is a very creative piece. And mathematical forms are pure, that’s true, but just because we’re people, we’re a bit irrational, some people more than others. And as an artist, that’s really an important trait, to encourage this, I guess you’d say.
Now, I wouldn’t use too many. I do on some of these desks, I do use an ellipse now and then, or it will be an elliptical cut section, because it’s really the, I guess you’d say, practical way to make some of the parts. The cutting angle would be too hard to figure out because they were freehand. But for the most part, my lines, they’re done with curving spines or curving sticks that I lay on the drawing table. And they’re my own lines, they aren’t from a pure mathematical point of view.
You will see it in some of the titles for my pieces -- Elliptical Shell Desks. So some of them are and some of them aren’t pure.
MS. GOLD: That’s very interesting.
[Audio break. Tape change.]
MS. GOLD: This is Donna Gold interviewing Jere Osgood on September 19, 2001. This is tape two, side one. I don’t think I’ve asked you about your influences and your teachers there. Who did you study with that made a difference for you?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, I’m eventually piecing all that together too. My teacher was Tage Frid. He was a Dane who had come over in about 1954. And it was really good that I got him. We didn’t get along that well at first, because I had the good luck or the misfortune of entering as a first year student, while I already had a piece that I was exhibiting in a show called “Young Americans” in New York City. So I always felt a little funny about this coming in as a first year student and already exhibiting.
MS. GOLD: What was the piece that you were exhibiting?
MR. OSGOOD: It was a little desk.
MS. GOLD: And how did it come to be that you were noticed?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, it was a show called “Young Americans.” You had to be under 30.
MS. GOLD: And you were about 20.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. And you see, I had left architectural school, but in that time span there, I had started turning plates and other things for America House. And then, when they told me or I read about it that this exhibition for people like me that are under 30 was coming up -- do something. And so I did, and it was a copy of a piece, not a copy, but a redesigned piece that was in my Aunt’s living room in Connecticut.
So anyway, he was a big influence. Tage Frid was terribly important to me. He had so much to offer, and I realized this, and I learned a lot of very, very important things from him. I also had a teacher called Michael Harmes. There were two teachers. Michael Harmes was from England, and they were a good team. And actually, I felt more comfortable with Michael; I didn’t get this undercurrent of, here’s this smart, in brackets, student. Michael challenged me, and he was very good. It was good to have the two of them as teachers.
Also at the time, I had made a good friend there at the school, Daniel Jackson. He was at school with me then. And I realized that his enthusiasm for making things, designing things and making things -- and at that point, he was an accomplished designer, he was more involved with antiques -- but this enthusiasm that he had for this career helped cement, in my thinking, that yes, I was doing the right thing. It’s not that I had conscious doubts about it, it’s just he came along, and in our discussions and so forth, you know, talking about what we’re doing in the school shop, that I realized that he was also an important factor.
I mean, he was a student, he wasn’t faculty. But in early years like that, I think things like that are important. Yeah, I mean, if I had generated a lot of doubts about what I was doing, I don’t know, I would have gone away and studied to be an insurance adjuster, I don’t know.
MS. GOLD: Wasn’t there a crafts movement, though, in the '50s that American House --
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, the '50s and '60s, we were riding on the carpet of a big crafts movement, and it was still going strong in the sixties. And it was also this romantic era that you could do whatever you wanted and never mind.
MS. GOLD: That began in the '50s.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, '50s and '60s. If you were around in the '60s, well, it was a special time. I’m glad I was there. And School for American Craftsmen was thriving then. I mean, there were students from all over coming in there -- I guess full enrollment. And all the students that were as impractical as I was that were thinking that they’d go out and set up shop and earn a living from this. And not too many of them are around. Some are -- there are some of us that have stayed with it.
MS. GOLD: But most moved on to other things?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, you could then. I’m jumping ahead of it, but ’75 to ’85 I taught at Boston University. When we started that program, there was still this great romantic movement, that students never asked about, can I make a living. But by the time we were closing in ’85, they were saying, in initial interviews, can I make a living at this. And I never asked them whether they were asking that question or their parents asked them to ask us. But in the sixties, you see, we were going strong. I mean, you could go out in the bushes and start weaving, and be a success and sleep under a rock, and like it. So I think it was a good time. I picked a good time to get started.
MS. GOLD: So now, Tage Frid, he was from Scandinavia, right?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, he was Danish.
MS. GOLD: So was that in itself an influence on you?
MR. OSGOOD: I didn’t think about it until I met him. I mean, I realized then there was always magazines and things around the school. But yes, there was all this good stuff coming out of Scandinavia, good furniture, and some was Danish, and some was Swedish, and Finnish, and Norwegian. Because prior to that, I was in architectural school looking at architectural magazines, but when I moved on to the School of American Craftsmen, I started looking at magazines directly related to furniture. And yeah, that was a very important thing, just seeing what was going on there.
MS. GOLD: So that had already been part of your awareness?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, it became part of it, yeah. I mean, like I said, it really didn’t exist until I enrolled there. I mean, if you asked me something about it, I don’t know how I would have responded then.
MS. GOLD: You mean, you didn’t know about it.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I just wasn’t aware of it.
MS. GOLD: Was that still the prevailing style that you were working in, in any case? I mean, when you were making the bookends, was that sort of simplified?
MR. OSGOOD: No. But I think probably some of the things I did at school had a Scandinavian flavor to them, because my teacher was Danish, and I had been looking at magazines and pictures. But things I did for the store in New York City, I don’t think they had any benefit of that.
MS. GOLD: And what about Michael Harmes’ work? What kind of work did he do?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, he was from England and very, very orderly in his approach to everything, and very precise and he wanted nice, accurate drawings, and very careful in his work. Whereas Tage Frid was very informal, gruff at times -- “All right, so you do a drawing.” [Laughs.] But it was a more careful procedure with Michael, and I just use that as an example. But I was doing good drawings anyway because I came prepared to do them with my drawing background from architecture.
They were quite different in personalities. Tage was very informal, and while Michael was extremely friendly, it was obvious that there was this English background that was a little more orderly than the Danes.
MS. GOLD: So when you look back at the School of American Craftsmen, what was it that you got from there?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh well, probably pretty much what I said before: it clarified my direction. From the minute I started there, I knew I was home. In the shop, we were asked to make things, we had to learn how to use all hand tools correctly. Tage Frid said I was using them all wrong, the joints I was doing were all wrong, and so forth. So I realized, yes, here it is, this is what I’ve always wanted to do.
MS. GOLD: Who was he?
MR. OSGOOD: Tage Frid was my teacher -- that yes, I was making the right decision. And this never stopped. As I said, my conversations with my friend Dan Jackson, at the time, also made this solid decision in my mind. So the three years that I spent there, they just really guaranteed my course. Now, the other continuing thing on this was that after I left there, I did go to Denmark for a year, and all that did was make it even more definite in my mind.
I met another furniture craftsman there, a Dane that I would like to have had as a teacher. I mean, at that point, I couldn’t do that easily. But he was another case of just proof that you were doing the right thing. So the three years just guaranteed me the beginning, and I could just see myself working with this for the rest of my life. And then, the time spent in Denmark sealed it up or something. I mean, I wasn’t going to think of doing anything else at that point.
MS. GOLD: Did you study in Denmark? Did you apprentice?
MR. OSGOOD: No, it was an organization called Scandinavian Seminar, and they used a total immersion concept. And you were meant to go live with two different families and then go to a school or study related to your field. Now, some people, I think, did get apprentices, but there were no studio craftsmen in my field. They don’t exist, really, except this one person that I did meet. So for me, it was living with the families, it was the total immersion with the culture, and then I did visit endless businesses and exhibitions, small factories.
I just made it my business to see everything I could possibly see relating to furniture making while I was there. And I think I would like to have apprenticed with somebody, but they operated on a different system. This is probably true in other European countries now. In Denmark, there are furniture designers and furniture makers. Here, we combine it. I’m a studio craftsmen: I design the things and make them. But they didn’t, and as far as I know, it isn’t too much different now.
They are very definite to vision. There’s really fine places that would make furniture, and then there’s a really good designer. And I endlessly had to answer this question when I was there. They would say to me, “Er det din egen mønster?” And I would say “Ja.” And what they were asking was, “Is this your own design?” And I’d have to say, “Yes, it is my design. I also make the things too.” And it was just endless. I needed a recording or something to say, yes, it was mine, because they didn’t think this way.
Whereas if you came here then or now, people would almost expect you to make it yourself. And so, I go into another culture or system where it’s funny. But I don’t know that it hindered too much of what I wanted to see there. I mean, I really benefitted from my time with the people that I stayed with. And I’m now doing the background work to try to get a trip back next spring or summer. Years have gone by, but I think I can do it. We’ll see.
MS. GOLD: When you were there, were you mostly looking at designers or makers, or both?
MR. OSGOOD: Both. Yeah, I kept meeting people and they’d take me to visit a small shop. Yeah, I was looking at everything.
MS. GOLD: And you went to a folk high school [Folkehøjskole] that they had there.
MR. OSGOOD: I went to a folk art school, yeah. It’s like a junior college, and they sent me to this particular one because it did have some courses related to crafts. Well, I took two of them: I studied bookbinding and weaving. And consequently, I can’t talk to anybody about bookbinding here because the terms I know are all in Danish. So it’s kind of a funny arrangement. But anyway, while I was there, I made a chair in the shop, and I had, in some cases, to make the tools. It really wasn’t equipped for woodworking.
But in those days, if I needed to cut something or a special joint, it didn’t seem funny to me. I’d just go out and look for a shop, and I’d go in and ask them, could I explain what I was doing, could I do this, or would they do it, or whatever. And they were all so helpful. They would always let me in. I guess you can get away with things as a student.
MS. GOLD: So you didn’t have to pay.
MR. OSGOOD: No, I remember one time I’d done quite a bit of work in this place; I had been underfoot for a while, and I asked them, do you want me to pay you for my time here, and he said, “Nieba boss, sei tag.” He said, “Just thank you is enough,” or something like that. So I said thank you many times. The people were like that, very warm, friendly people. I had a good time there.
And I did meet this Danish craftsman who was a maker. And so, that was very interesting, and I got familiar with his work. And he was really the only one that was -- he was designing his own things and making them. And he had been thrown out of the guild because of this. They thought he was peculiar, so he sort of worked on his own. He was a teacher at a folk school, but he did make things and sell them.
MS. GOLD: What was his name?
MR. OSGOOD: Peder Moos.
MS. GOLD: And this is the person you would have liked to have studied with.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I would have liked to. My friend Daniel Jackson that I had met in school, he had gone and been there for a year and had worked with him, and so I got everything firsthand, so to speak, because we continued writing or he would see me, and I benefitted from his time with this craftsman. And I’ve got some pictures of his work, and I’m going to try to get some more if I can get back next summer. People here do know about his work, so it’s not too well known, but they’re interested in it from a historical point of view. It’s a little different approach to Danish furniture.
MS. GOLD: Do you think of him as an influence on you?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, yes and no. I mean, he’s part of this same picture that I was drawing, that there were just events and people that really solidified my direction. Because he was somebody that was really intensely involved in his work, a very intense person. And I saw that, and I could feel it. Also, his use -- I can’t put it in words easily, but the joinery that he used, the way he used it on the furniture kind of made an impression on me, the way things were put together. It was part of his whole, I guess you’d say, his whole philosophy, which I can’t get into easily. But he was part of my whole early picture of helping me get a strong direction for myself.
MS. GOLD: Is it important to have a philosophy?
MR. OSGOOD: Yes, I guess it is, but I don’t really like to use that word, because to me, it sets up a whole miasma of things. And there may be an easier way of saying it, that it isn’t a philosophy, it’s a state of being. Maybe that’s a simpler way of approaching it. If you do a lot of writing, maybe you know what I mean.
MS. GOLD: Maybe, although you wouldn’t care to put it in --
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I’d hesitate to ask somebody exactly what their philosophy was, because I would think of how awkward it would be for me to be confronted with that as a question. So I drop the word now and then, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I picked the right word.
MS. GOLD: You were talking about a time when you were just starting out as a furniture maker, and yet, you had this tremendous amount of success. I mean, you were in the “Young Americans” exhibit in New York and you were selling already. I mean, did that help you have confidence?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, yeah.
MS. GOLD: Was that hard for you with your relationship to other students and teachers?
MR. OSGOOD: I never thought much about it at the time. I mean, I was selling things, but I wasn’t hearing from other students that they were trying to sell things and didn’t. So yeah, it wasn’t anything that I thought about at the time, but it was definitely an important thing to me, because it did give me confidence.
MS. GOLD: And you were actually selling things also in Denmark, or were you just making?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I couldn’t there. I mean, I think the store in New York City would have liked to have had me keep working over there and ship things back, but they sort of hung in midair for a year and waited -- hope you’re coming back sort. I did hear about it now or then through my father or mother.
MS. GOLD: And it was just a year program.
MR. OSGOOD: It was a school year, yeah.
MS. GOLD: And you were in the north of Denmark.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I was on the mainland in northern Jutland. It’s pretty close to Norway, actually. But that was where I was initially, but I did stay with a family just outside of Copenhagen, and that was a marvelous thing. Every morning, I got up and got on the train to go into the city. I went somewhere new every day, I think.
MS. GOLD: And so, you were just traveling and visiting, and no obligations.
MR. OSGOOD: Well, by living with this family outside of the city, they entertained me a little. I mean, they took me to a few places, but not much. They realized that what I wanted to do was go to the showrooms, and the museums, and all the things in the city. I mean, other students had stayed with them before, and that’s what they were doing. So they were great. Trains were good, right on time, fast.
MS. GOLD: And then, you came back. And did you think of yourself as part of like an international movement or international tradition, or did you think of yourself as yourself?
MR. OSGOOD: No, people knew I had studied in Denmark and they knew I’d had Tage Frid as a teacher. And I know to this day, people will say, oh well, I can see a Danish flavor in your work. I think it’s kind of bewildering. And they would say that at the time -- oh, you’re making Danish furniture -- soon after I got back. And I’d say, “No, I’m making my furniture.” But I didn’t give it any thought that I was part of any big movement or anything. You have to think of those things years later when you’re doing a historical analysis or something.
MS. GOLD: Was modern contemporary furniture at that time Scandinavian influenced?
MR. OSGOOD: Heavily influenced, yes. When I was there in 1960, it was the waning years of the influence of Scandinavian furniture.
MS. GOLD: Waning?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, it was on the way down. We didn’t know it at that time, but that’s considered now by historians or something that was sort of the tail end of their best period, you know, Denmark, the four Scandinavian countries.
MS. GOLD: And so, then you came back to the United States.
MR. OSGOOD: I came back and I immediately got to work in my father’s basement and worked there. And within a month, I had ordered a machine from Denmark that I really liked, that I had used a lot when I was there. And I just started making money.
[Audio break. Tape change.]
MR. OSGOOD: I’d have to do some careful research, but I think I moved to Connecticut in ’63 or ’64. Immediately, I started looking in a circle around New York City: I wanted to moved out of the city. When I left for college at the age of 17, I was, in many ways, glad to leave Staten Island and New York City. And so when I came back to work in the basement, okay, this is wonderful, but I know I didn’t want to do it for very long. So I was looking in a circle, and I finally found a place, 83 miles I think it was, from Manhattan in Connecticut, and bought an old creamery for some absurd price like $6,000 and set to work renovating that, and lived there until ’78, I think.
But it got me off in a good direction. I got my own place. It was a large room, large shop with high ceilings and kind of primitive in some respects, but it was my base for many years. And it was a really good move because it was important for me to have my own place that I could work on the way I wanted to. So it was an important move.
MS. GOLD: You said that when you came back you started making money. And I was wondering, how did people know about your work?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, I had been selling things through American House, the store in New York City, and now and then there’d come an exhibition at the American Craft Museum, and so the same people were involved with the store as were involved with the museum. And so, they would either tell me or I’d just get the stuff automatically in the mail, like something’s coming up. So I always had the policy, and I told any students, every student I can now, take every possible chance to exhibit your work.
So in those early years, I was taking every opportunity. I mean, if some show was in New York City or wherever, upstate New York, I was going to have a piece in it, and I would. And that really helped me get my name out. And in the years I worked for America House, my work was advertised in all the big magazines -- you know, like what was it, House and Garden; there was another one, American Home; there was a review of my work in the New Yorker.
MS. GOLD: In the New Yorker.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I had work in a show on Staten Island and they reviewed the show. You know, when I was in school, I made this big effort to get exhibited everything I could possibly do, and it paid off, I think. I mean, I was starting to become well known. It’s very important. I tell people that now and well, okay -- I don’t know whether they hear me, but it worked for me.
MS. GOLD: And what were people seeking you out for?
MR. OSGOOD: What?
MS. GOLD: Can you describe the elements of your work that was making you well known?
MR. OSGOOD: I don’t know; that’s a hard thing to say. Yeah, because I was doing chairs and tables, but I don’t think I could say there was any one thing. I’d have to think about that. I tried for years to get -- I don’t know if I tried for years -- but I soon realized I didn’t want to make small accessories forever. And so, in the ten years I was producing them, I was also trying to get larger pieces of furniture out and shifted to that. So that by about 1970, I’d completely, yeah, ’60 to ’70, I’d completely stopped the accessories. And there’s a bookend up there behind you. Do you see the circle in it?
MS. GOLD: Yeah.
MR. OSGOOD: That’s the bookend that I made during that time. And I was trying to not make bookends anymore, and I’d get orders for like 100 or 144 pairs of those, a gross. So finally, I said, “Look, I have higher expenses now. I’m no longer going to charge you $16; they’re going to be $32.” And initially, it didn’t stop the orders. [Laughs.]
MS. GOLD: And you said, “Why didn’t I --
MR. OSGOOD: Why didn’t I do this years ago? I made money at $16, and I made twice as much at $32. But they kind of got the message that I was trying to get out from under the thing, and I think that things were changing at the store too, so we were both sort of changing our ways.
MS. GOLD: Well, while we’re talking -- this might move us forward a bit -- but while we’re talking, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the market and just the economic issues of being a craftsperson. Has the market for American craft changed?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I think the difference is you need more money now than you did in the sixties. I use the figure that I could get by on $1,000 a month. And generally speaking -- this is the way other people explain it to me -- okay, they’re making a living, but they’re not making very much. And so, I think the prices that, generally, people can charge for their work doesn’t really give them a really good living. So that hasn’t gone up enough.
MS. GOLD: That hasn’t changed.
MR. OSGOOD: Whereas, maybe in the sixties or the '50s, it might have been more equal, more possible to make a better living. And am I explaining it right? Yes, there are lots of people working now, making lots of furniture, but they’re not making very much money from it.
MS. GOLD: Do you see a greater interest in crafts?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, there’s a huge interest, and I’ve ridden along with this. I mean, it really didn’t exist when I first started working in the late '50s. Yeah, people know now that they can get things directly from a craftsman or they can ask to have things made specifically for them. But there’s a price limitation. This group I belong to here, the New Hampshire Furniture Masters’ Association, generally does pretty well, but I feel that in general, the prices are low for their work. And the position I’m at now in my career, I get good prices for my work. It’s because I’m well known and the gallery that I have is very aware of this, and they could get what would be good prices for my things.
MS. GOLD: So you were saying that there’s more people able to make a living, but they’re not necessarily --
MR. OSGOOD: But it’s not a great living, yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of people out there making furniture now, and it just doesn’t pay well. Every once in a while, somebody does really well with it, but I’d like prices to be higher for everybody.
MS. GOLD: And it seems like you’ve managed to have a few dealers that you have long-standing relationships with. You’ve always worked with galleries. Is that correct?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, yeah, more so now. I did a lot of work, more direct, before, but I don’t really like selling my own work. I’ve been happier letting them share the income, because I have to give them a percentage. I used to work through several galleries, and I’ve now pretty much eliminated it down to one.
MS. GOLD: And that is --
MR. OSGOOD: Pritam and Eames on Long Island. And they’re wonderful. They take the time to understand what I’m doing, and also, they take care to understand what all of us are doing. They treat the customers very well, they understand what we’re doing, and they also pay promptly. And you probably have heard this from other people, that galleries don’t pay. It may take a year to get paid. They pay within, oh, I don’t know, certainly within 30 days, sometimes even faster. If it’s a customer that’s bought things before, so they know their checks are good, they’ll pay me right away. And I don’t ask for it, they do it.
MS. GOLD: Do they have a wide range of people that they sell to, or -- geographically, I guess I’m asking.
MR. OSGOOD: Well, they’re out at the end of Long Island, so they’re mostly New Yorkers, and that’s probably a benefit, because the New Yorkers expect everything to be expensive. [Laughs.] So that part is a good deal. And East Hampton isn’t an inexpensive place to live, so that part is good. They’d be okay anywhere, I think; they’re just very friendly people that take a strong interest in all aspects of our work.
MS. GOLD: And you’ve had other galleries in the past, but why have you decided to --
MR. OSGOOD: Well, in some cases, it was okay, but others, it’s a standard procedure not to pay, and we know that. That’s the major reason. And they’ve been working, operating since about 1977 or something, well, ’79 maybe.
MS. GOLD: So when you first moved out to Connecticut, you were working –
MR. OSGOOD: When I was in Connecticut, I was working with America House in New York City. I worked direct to people that would find me.
MS. GOLD: And did you have the ability to make whatever you wanted to make?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, well, when I was younger there, I did work for architects occasionally. I would never do that now, but it’s a good way to keep the shop busy or make extra money. I did work for -- a church had burned down somewhere between Connecticut and New York City, and it had all these huge beams that were all charred, and they wanted me to make new pieces for the church. So the architect drew them up, and I attacked the beams, because they were all burnt, smoked, and full of nails.
I made these very heavy things. I wouldn’t claim them as my work, but I did them and they came out well. I even carved some grape leaves and grapes, which I don’t normally do now; I’m not that kind of carver. They had to come down the front of the lectern. And there was a lot of lettering on this altar. I wouldn’t do that now. I mean, I’m past that age.
MS. GOLD: But it seems like you’ve had the ability to create --
MR. OSGOOD: Yes, for the most part, I’ve been expected to do that and free to do that. Yeah, I’ve been asked to do things because they expect me to design them. That does go way back, even though at the time, I didn’t realize it. To me, it just seemed like a natural thing.
MS. GOLD: I wonder if you could somehow talk about how your designs have changed, maybe by talking about some special early pieces and how that evolved.
MR. OSGOOD: Well, probably one easy thing would be to say that maybe the earlier furniture looked more like furniture. And people do say now that my work does look more like sculpture; its influence is more from sculpture. And I have said that myself, that I don’t feel terribly influenced by furniture makers now. I’m looking to furniture as a sculptural form, although it must be functional furniture. I’m not going to make non-functional furniture. So yeah, it’s changed. The pictures in the other room on the wall I showed you, they’re sculptural forms.
That’s the direction I’m more interested in now. I’m not interested in reassembling dead furniture makers’ body parts -- you know, a leg here [laughs]. This is expected in the traditional furniture field. I mean, you usually have a Hepplewhite leg and a Macintosh shoulder -- this is the way it’s done. If I have a Hepplewhite leg, it’s purely accidental. It’s something in my subconscious.
MS. GOLD: Was there any resistance as you got more sculptural?
MR. OSGOOD: No, no. This is considered a creative bent. That’s okay, particularly now: a lot of furniture is becoming very sculptural, much more so than ten years ago, maybe. And I think a lot of them are going so far that it’s no longer furniture. It’s sculptural things that have some allusion to furniture, once in a while. So it’s a trend, and I would fit in a sense, because yes, my forms are becoming more sculptural, but I’m insisting that they be very functional.
But a few years ago, I was thrilled I had a piece in an exhibition, and this woman came by and said, “Well, it’s very nice, but what is it?” And I was thrilled, because what I was trying to do was get away from these associations. It was a desk, but it didn’t look like a desk to her.
MS. GOLD: Was it one of your --
MR. OSGOOD: No, it was a flattop desk with curving legs, but it just didn’t occur to her. I don’t know whether she thought very much about it. But wow, that’s great, I’ve got a piece that somebody’s asking, what is it. I’ve finally broken through the associative barrier. People like to do this. They like to look at something and say to themselves, this reminds me of something else I like. And I’m trying in my thinking and feeling to get to a pure form that’s not going to ride on this associative thing, but be strong in its own context.
I mean, in music, it would be like a fugue. If you listen to it, you wouldn’t necessarily have a melody there, you would just appreciate it because of its pure musical form, and there wouldn’t be an old folk remedy or song that it reminded you of. Do you see what I mean?
MS. GOLD: And yet, you want it to be useful as an object.
MR. OSGOOD: Definitely. I want the function. It may not be clear -- I mean, in the case of this woman that saw it and didn’t know it was a desk -- but if you’d just take a second look, you’d see that it was a desk with a drawer, you could sit at it and write letters.
MS. GOLD: How important is comfort?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, comfort also, yeah. I’ve done a lot of chairs, many chairs, and that’s where you talk about comfort, because you sit in a chair, you don’t sit on a cabinet.
MS. GOLD: But when you’re talking about function, you’re not only talking about the fact that it’s useful, that you can put things in it, but also that it’s efficient --
MR. OSGOOD: If it’s a chair, it has to be comfortable to sit in; if it’s a desk, it has to function like a desk; or if it’s a storage cabinet, you have to make sure the cubby holes are big enough to hold the folders or things like that, just lists of practical things. This settee you’re sitting on is reputed to be very comfortable. It sold very well. I don’t even make them now anymore. They keep selling. I kept one. And I have very little of my work here; I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but there’s not much.
Well, I have that cabinet. This is a piece I did as a student, so it’s not a now piece, it’s just one I’ll always keep. I have no intention of selling it. It’s a piece I did when I was a student at school. But there isn’t a lot of my work here. There’s two chairs in the other room. But some woodworkers’ homes you go in and there’s all sorts of furniture in there that they’ve made. I’ve never been able to afford to do that -- number one reason.
MS. GOLD: [Laughs.] That’s always an issue, isn’t it.
MR. OSGOOD: I mean, I just kept this one because -- it’s time you had one. And the old couch I had here was a wreck and it had to go out. But it cost me $7,000 or $8,000 to keep it.
MS. GOLD: That’s an expensive couch.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. And then, last year, the person who does the cleaning here ran into it and gouged the arm out. That doesn’t make me happy. I’ve got to get it in the shop and let Niki work on it. She does all the finishing work.
MS. GOLD: When you started to get more sculptural, was that when you moved here to New Hampshire?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I don’t think so. That’s come along of its own accord. The one thing I do know is when I left the basement on Staten Island, the work got bigger. I had a 16-foot ceiling and a room that was 24 feet square, way out there, and I was very aware of that. The ceiling was like six foot nine or something, or maybe it was seven feet. I used to hit some of the pipes in my father’s basement. I expanded my horizon or expanded my world when I moved to my larger space. But as for the other change, that’s taken place slowly over the years. It’s a mind set or something that has to grow or change as time goes by.
MS. GOLD: It seems that, when I was looking at your other pictures, that hasn’t changed from looking at it in three dimension. There’s an organic quality to it and almost like a dancing quality. There’s a movement to your work.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I’ve tried to do that. There’s a feeling to these little tables, which I spent a long time studying things like that, the way it sort of, it’s not moving, but it’s got a stance to it that’s important to me. And there’s years of thought left on that; I mean, that’s just something I’ll move along with.
MS. GOLD: When you were gesturing, you were looking almost like a cat.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah.
MS. GOLD: And I was wondering if you watch your neighborhood cats a lot.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, that’s funny. The leg forms that I use here -- and there’s a table in the other room that’s covered up -- those are root forms. My pedestal forms are root forms. And this goes back to, do you remember I said we went to Vermont every summer with my parents? Well, I used to spend a long time, afternoons, just walking by myself along the shore of the lake or in the woods, and there were always these great cedar trees and other things, and water would come in and wash the roots clean. And I know I was influenced by the feeling in these root forms.
So later on, when I got to laminating these curving leg forms, I know I was drawing on these images of the root forms. And on the other hand, I have a feeling for water also, the way water falls down in a slight curve, and I have used that. If you see water coming down a waterfall and the wind is blowing, the stream of water will have a definite line to it. And I know I have that occasionally.
[Audio break. Tape change.]
MS. GOLD: So you were talking about the movement of water.
MR. OSGOOD: Oh yeah, I’ve noticed that, you know, when I’m doing sketches. The same thing could be said about wind as a form line too. I mean, it’s pretty abstract to say you’re influenced by falling water or the wind, but it’s almost easier to say I’m influenced by root forms from trees, and that’s understandable, at least I think that’s more understandable than saying I’d see some wind forms or some water forms in my work. And I don’t mind. In fact, that’s why we have a sketchbook. We’re supposed to jot down either words or sketches.
And I see it as an influence; I don’t know what to do with it. I wouldn’t want to set out to design a piece that was -- at least not yet, anyway -- that was only influenced by water, or something like that.
MS. GOLD: But you know that you’re self consciously trying to get that shape.
MR. OSGOOD: I just did a -- well, I didn’t just do it -- two years ago, a table, well, the wave table; there may have been a picture of it in something you saw. And I had a lot of difficulties with that in its initial stages. I couldn’t come to an answer, so I went back to the original thought that it was for a house by the sea. And as soon as I started thinking more about the ocean and the way the waves moved, I had it done in half a day or something -- I mean the drawings, not the table. It took form very quickly once this idea took over, the water, and the reeds, and the sand. It was the way the water would move.
I let those things happen, at this point, just happen of their own accord. I suppose it’s a design problem. If you’re in school, you’d be given an assignment -- make something that’s influenced by water. And I wouldn’t be interested in that. Maybe that would be influenced by something else. I’d be forced to do it as an assignment.
MS. GOLD: But as you have developed over the years as a furniture maker, you find yourself increasingly influenced by –
MR. OSGOOD: Well, just other things, organic things that are occurring out there, which would be water, wind, and things that aren’t dimensional. Like a tree root is very dimensional, and we can definitely be, as designers, be influenced by things that are not dimensional. You can’t put a dimension on a breeze or a wind, and it’s very important to be open to that, or the sound that comes along maybe at the same time. How does the sound affect what you’re designing? Interesting.
MS. GOLD: How does the sound influence you?
MR. OSGOOD: I don’t know.
MS. GOLD: There’s a question here that says, “What are the most powerful influences in your career,” and in parentheses, “people, art movements, technological developments?”
MR. OSGOOD: We’d have to talk about that quite a while.
MS. GOLD: The most powerful influences in your career.
MR. OSGOOD: Well, the important thing was making the decision to study furniture design and making in the first place. I don’t know whether I mentioned it other places before or not, but one trigger I -- in fact, the major influence -- the one thing I do always mention, or influences in your life, I may just, if I’m giving a slide show, I may just say it anyway. It was when I saw Wharton Esherick’s work. I don’t know whether you’ve come across his work or not. He was a sculptor turned furniture maker in Pennsylvania, and he was selling and exhibiting his work in the early '50s in New York City.
And this is about the time I was going to start school, you see, which would have been around ’56, ’57. And when I saw his work, what it was was permission to do what I wanted to do in the way of furniture forms, and wow, you can really do that. Whereas before that, I’d been exposed to the furniture in department stores and furniture stores, and his work wasn’t like that at all; it was very sculptural. And so, that was a big turning point. Now, you’ll interview some other furniture makers and there’s a lot of us that will say, well, he was a major influence.
So he’s a very important figure. Fortunately, they’ve preserved his place as a little museum, so people can go there and see a lot of his old pieces. Okay, so that was a major thing. Now, how to define the rest of the stages, do you want it in stages or any big bang?
MS. GOLD: Actually, I realized I sort of jumped --
MR. OSGOOD: Because I think we’ve sort of covered a lot of it, I just hadn’t put it in words. Like I said, Tage Frid was a very strong influence. Michael Harmes was a different kind of influence. My friend Daniel Jackson, I mean, he was manic, in some respects, just this amazing enthusiasm that surrounded me as a student there. So that keyed in. So then, we move along and I left for Denmark. To get this in stages, I don’t really think there was a big bang, I’d say, unless you’d call the initial first months in the School for American Craftsmen. That would have been a big bang, or yes, I’ve come home.
But then, it moved along through my teachers there, the influence of students, and then my trip to Denmark was kind of solidifying of things further and meeting this amazing Dane. And then, as I started work back in New York, got going, and was able to get accepted sales for furniture by the seventies, this could be considered a turning point, because that was what I was going to do from then on. And a lot of those years were very difficult years because I was married then and it was not going well, and there’s an amazing group of pieces that were done under what would be bizarre or stressful conditions. But I was able to retreat into the shop and work on them. So I continued doing the work that I really wanted to do.
But in a way, I think it’s been a slow growth process rather than to say there was any big strong major bang influence. And I’ve been known to say a lot of the time I feel like I’m ten years retarded, but sometimes other people do it faster. I have said that.
MS. GOLD: [Laughs.] And marital discord was a good influence in a way.
MR. OSGOOD: Yes, well, I don’t want to give that a lot of strength, I just know at the time that it was probably lucky that I had the cocoon of the work or the cocoon of the shop to go into. And good stuff came out of that awful period there. So sometimes it works. Maybe you’d better rephrase the question or read it again, and I’ll see if anything else occurs to me.
MS. GOLD: Well, the question is, what are the most powerful influences in your career, but I think you --
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I did say the right thing, and I didn’t think there was any big, smashing bang; it was just a succession of things. And I did want to give Wharton Esherick a lot of credit there for the revelation.
MS. GOLD: So when you began working on your own -- I think I’m a little unclear -- you were creating accessories; you were creating pieces that were your own design, and those were a lot for shows and juried kind of exhibitions.
MR. OSGOOD: A lot of them were for sale in New York. I did sell furniture through American House in addition to the accessories. So they took pieces, or individuals contacted me directly.
MS. GOLD: Were those commissions?
MR. OSGOOD: I can’t remember. Well, I remember I got an order for a dining table in there. That was as a result of an earlier sale of a chest of drawers through American House -- led to a commission for a dining table, and then after that, chairs. So those were private commissions. It’s hard for me to remember now the balance of the work sold through galleries versus work that was directly commissioned. I can’t remember. Like I said, occasionally, I did work that was for hire, so to speak; other people had designed it. But I only did that because it would kind of bring in some fast money.
MS. GOLD: Do you still do commissions? I mean, is that an important part of your --
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, there’s one coming up right now for a big desk.
MS. GOLD: Does that differ from your other work?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, yes and no. We also have coming, through Pritam and Eames, another commission that we’ll be working on here in the shop. It will be, I think, eight chairs and then a table, and that’s a commission that’s been set up by the gallery. The work won’t go on the floor, it will go directly to them. But this other desk project I’ve got to do, it’s kind of an odd situation, in that he knows I’m represented by the gallery, but yet, he came to me directly. And I told him about it, and well, all right, I’ll do it. I’m getting kind of grumpy now, because in most cases, I’d rather the customers go through the gallery, because there’s just things I’ve lost patience bothering with, and the people that run galleries do that as a business.
MS. GOLD: Is it beneficial to you, then, commissions?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, yes and no, because this commission through the gallery is a chair that I’ve made before. It’s in a different wood. The table may be a new design; I don’t know. And they would easily do this, because they would show pictures of my work or he had something there, and it means duplicating it again. Now, I’ve always said that it’s not the commissions that move me ahead, it’s the pieces done free and clear for exhibitions. It could be a museum exhibition or -- what was I saying?
MS. GOLD: That the commissions move you ahead, from the gallery work.
MR. OSGOOD: Okay, the gallery piece is done without any restrictions. I’m designing the piece in the air, so to speak. And the piece I did this spring for Pritam and Eames was also done with no restrictions on it. It was for a big opening, so it was a totally new piece. Those are the pieces, over the years, that moved me ahead, that don’t have the specifications that a customer might give. And some people don’t mind this. I mean, they feel it’s part of the whole project to work with the customer. And yes, I agree with that to a certain extent, but I also know that my pieces, for the most part, that move me along the way. I did it on my own without the customer.
Sometimes, they can be a real nuisance, or something, I mean, sizes, and colors, and forms, and shapes. Maybe I’m just getting grouchier about it now or something; it just doesn’t always excite me to do things exactly the way they want them.
MS. GOLD: How about repeating designs? Do you mind doing –
MR. OSGOOD: A certain amount of that. Like this table we’ve been making for quite a while, and a certain amount of it’s all right. And also, it keeps the shop going. I’ve got to have enough work going for Niki. So yeah, a certain amount of it’s all right, but I don’t want to do that all the time. I have another person that comes two days a week, and she’s more of an apprentice. Mickey’s no longer an apprentice. So these repeat things are important just to keep things going in the shop.
MS. GOLD: Have you always had an apprentice?
MR. OSGOOD: Usually, yeah, over the years, I’ve either had an apprentice or somebody that would come in and work part time, or full time, or whatever. Yeah, it was just a succession of people.
MS. GOLD: And so, it’s comfortable for you to work with other people.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, that’s okay. In the case with Niki, I wanted her to work for me because she had worked for another woodworker here, Jon Brooks, and so I knew she had an understanding of sculptural form. So what happens now is that I’ll give her parts that have been shaped by a machine, which I’d be doing, and I give them to her and she takes over and does the hand shaping. All of this forming of the parts on the chairs and so forth, she would be doing that.
And she and I had initially done it with pine models and things, so I know that she knows we’re thinking the same. So we’ve developed a pretty good working relationship over the years. I don’t need to explain things very much to her, and that’s ideal. Other people I’ve had, they can handle the joinery and things like that, so I might not be doing as much of that. Now I do all the joinery. Although, the second person now that’s coming along is very good at that, so I may give her more responsibility. But she, I don’t think, will be here very long.
MS. GOLD: You now make designs, and you’ve always done your designs on your paper, and then made a model.
MR. OSGOOD: I make full-size, pine cardboard models, not model models, but full-size mock-ups.
MS. GOLD: In pine and cardboard.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, it’s usually the white New Hampshire pine, and it’s pretty easy to shape. What I’m after is seeing how the form affects me and how it affects the space in a room. And while I can visualize this very well, I’m always trying to double-check it: Do I see it right? And so, by doing this pine model, it won’t be in the fine wood -- it wouldn’t be in the walnut or the cherry -- but I can get a good feeling for the form. And the size, you know, if a dining table is going to be four by six feet, we’ve got to see how that affects the space, so I can get a good understanding of how that’s going to work.
The pine model, the added thing there is it may be the time where I’ll do the final decisions on the form and then go over it with my helper. So she knows exactly what it’s going to look like, but if it’s all wrong, we’ll just scrap it and do another one that’s correct. I don’t do any miniature models, like some people do little chair models, four inches high. And I absolutely refuse to do that. It all goes back to years ago when I was thinking of working on a graduate degree, which was going to be on perception, and I strongly believe we perceive small things differently than large things.
It’s because of our eye span. We can see 15 degrees -- if we can see this much that’s on this table, but if it’s a table this long, it means we either have to move our eyes or our head. We’re scanning it. And if you stop in the middle of a six-foot table, then we’re looking at -- or something there, and our peripheral vision out here and out here is influencing how I appreciate this large piece. And if that initial analysis on my part is done only on a small model where I can see the whole thing, I can’t see that I’m going to get the right impression back.
I can’t really say I’ve got anybody else working on this as yet, there’s a perception thing going on there. But I’m finding there are a lot of people that do-do the full size mock-ups. They won’t admit that they don’t like small ones, they just like the full size ones. So I’ve got to try to get them to say why approach it this way.
MS. GOLD: So can you say how your work has changed over time? I think we started to talk about that.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I don’t know that I can add too much to that, other than I feel it has gotten more sculptural. And it’s gotten more sculptural; in my case, it may hopefully be a better understanding of three-dimensional form that’s happened to me over the years. So as I see more things and more things happen -- I refer to it as building a vocabulary of pieces or a vocabulary of images. And as a student, you don’t have this in your early years, but as you’ve made piece, after piece, after piece, what we’re doing is seeing the whole development chain.
You have the idea, then make some sketches, and then if those work out, then develop them a little further, then maybe some larger sketches, then, probably at the same time, make a full-size mock-up and crude drawings, and then the next stage would be to make some final shop drawings or construction drawings. And then, the final stage would be seeing the completed piece, and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve done that. So if I’m smart, I guess I’ve been able to remember what, if I do this in the early stage, what it’s going to look like in the final piece. So hopefully, I’ve gotten a better understanding of this form and the way it develops.
MS. GOLD: But at some point in there, you began to work with this lamination process.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, but that was a lamination technique. That was to prop up my form that I was doing. That’s how that came about. And I drew these legs, I made the legs in the normal manner, and they were weak and there were cuts through glue lines, which you just don’t scarf glue lines, so that gave me the idea of laminating it in tapers. And so, it’s a method or a technique -- it’s a support for my design ideas. And it just happens that I’m doing these shell forms and these curving leg forms, and I like those forms, so then it would follow that I would laminate them.
MS. GOLD: I see, I see, it didn’t come the other way around.
[Audio break.]
MS. GOLD: And you were also teaching.
MR. OSGOOD: Yes, I taught two days a week in New York City. I went down to the Craft Students League and taught there. My mother was living on Staten Island at the time, so I would stay one night there, and after I got married, I cut that back to one long day rather than the two nights. So I taught for, I think, eight years at the Craft Students League.
MS. GOLD: Where was that located?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, at that time, it was on the West Side around 50th Street, I think it was, and it was still safe to walk around New York after dark. Yeah, that would have been ’62 to ’70, or something like that. What launched me on my academic career was a friend of mine who was teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art wanted a spring term off, so I was invited to fill in his time there. And I was made an instant assistant professor, and I had been teaching, of course, in New York City, so I had teaching experience.
Anyway, that led to me being invited to teach back at my old school up in Rochester. So they interviewed me while I was teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art. It’s called the University of the Arts now, I think. And because I was there with the status of an assistant professor, they had to give me the same title when I moved on to RIT, and I was there for three years. It was a smart move on my part: I hadn’t sold the old place up in Connecticut when I went up to RIT. After a while, we just decided that we really liked Connecticut, didn’t like upstate New York too much.
The climate there is sort of an exaggerated version of New York City, cold, wind, rain. And New York is bad enough, but there, it’s on a grander scale. And it’s just a different atmosphere in Connecticut, so I retired from teaching. Within a year, I was back starting all over again. In 1975, this new school was founded in Boston at Boston University, and they wanted me to teach there part time. And I said “No, I don’t want to teach,” and they must have called me three times, and I finally concluded, well, every time he calls, the salary will maybe go up. So he called once more, and so the last time he called, I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
So that was the beginning of my career at Boston University. My marriage was starting to fall apart again at that point -- at that point, we had two sons. And so, in some respects, I just thought, well, maybe it would be better to be away a lot in Boston.
MS. GOLD: This was the same marriage.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. And it’s about a three-and-a-half-hour drive, I guess. And so, the marriage didn’t survive this, and we were divorced in ’78. And we had to sell the place in Connecticut, and I just lived in several apartments in Boston for a while and had a shop at the school, which was kind of quaint. It was in an elevator shaft, but I still wanted my own place.
MS. GOLD: It was tall.
MR. OSGOOD: [Laughs.] High ceilings, yeah. I was really a little pinched. But it was all right. Those were ten good years there. And President Silber finally figured out that we weren’t ever going to make a lot of money for Boston University, and we were expected to really rake it in, I guess. But we managed to make it break even, was my understanding. But arts programs at a university level don’t pay; they have to be supported by an active board that helps raise donations, and we were never able to get that going. And anyway, it was ten good years.
I moved up here sort of accidentally. My older son was at school -- well, you didn’t come that way, but High Mowing is just down the road, and he was at school there, boarding.
MS. GOLD: What school?
MR. OSGOOD: It’s called High Mowing. It’s a Waldorf school, and it’s the only resident Waldorf high school. So I wanted to move up closer to where he was, and so I kept looking around the neighborhood here. And also, my younger son, he was living with me by that time, and I wanted him to go to the lower school, so he started second grade when I moved here. So that worked out very well. I’ve been very productive since ’85; a lot of good stuff’s been made here after the school closed in ’85. And they’re off on their own good careers.
MS. GOLD: Your children.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah.
MS. GOLD: Not a carpenter, not a furniture maker among them?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I’d like that, but I’ve got the equivalent almost. My older son is an artist. He studied photography and he does that, and then painting. So he’s involved with that, and he lives in New York City. My younger son is a developmental physicist that does all these things that I can barely understand. And it’s very interesting because what that means is that he’s given an assignment, we’ll call it, and it’s, in a way, similar to the way I approach an assignment to design and make a special cabinet in my shop. He has to follow a lot of the same creative directions that I’d be doing making furniture. And I think this is very interesting that he’s inherited this, that he really likes this; this is what he does. And he’s got a very good job developing things.
MS. GOLD: So do you have a typical day in your work? You’re not designing every day.
MR. OSGOOD: Yes and no. It’s very important to keep an open mind. It may be a day where I am working at the drafting table all day, but that may not be creative work. It may be work that’s just doing the drawings because of previous work. And other days or weeks, I may just spend making parts which have been drawn up. But what’s very important is the thinking time is left open enough so that if I have some idea that’s for a new piece, that I’ll stop the table saw and I’ll go over to the drawing table and either make some sketches or draw something that will suddenly become clear to me.
I do a lot of thinking. The machine work is very automatic. My hands can work and my brain can go somewhere else. And so, yes, there’s a typical day, but the typical day, I guess you could say, would either be machine work or drafting work. But the open thing is to keep an open track there, that I’m able to stop and jot down things either on drawings or sketchbook, and then I can go back to them later and develop them.
I have a pace in the shop. I try to start work between 8:00 and 8:30, and then I work until 6:00 every day. And usually, this is frequently seven days a week. And then, I may take four days off. I can take my weekends in the middle of the week. And this started years ago. I’m not tied to the corporate world. And I like that idea, and my doctors like it too. You’ve been working all this time, seven days a week, that’s what’s kept you in good shape for all these years. You’re not sitting around. So I’ll expect to continue that. Does that describe a typical day?
MS. GOLD: Yeah, that’s enough. But as opposed to the Danish designers, you find yourself thinking through your designs as you’re doing the handwork, or as you’re doing the other work.
MR. OSGOOD: Well, it’s probably, at that point, I’m thinking of the next one, the next project, not the one I’m working on.
MS. GOLD: Right, that’s what I mean.
MR. OSGOOD: I’m working ahead. Like I said, there is a certain amount of creative work that has to be done for the drawings, and then it’s developed through loose, full size sketches, and then I need final shop drawings, which, in many cases, have to be very accurate. And so, those might take me two or three days of drawing for different stages. It’s just that more creative stuff, that I’ve got to see it when it comes by. And I think there’s a lot to this business of left brain, right brain. We just don’t quite understand it. The creative work is done with the right brain, and you relax and try to stay open. Like things just flow by there, and if you strain too much, it shifts over into the other side, which is more mathematical and too orderly. A typical day: I take care of breakfast and then I water the plants and feed Max.
MS. GOLD: Your studio seems very open to light and spacious. That’s important.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. That window faces south, and it can get really hot, but it’s also wonderful for so many months of the year that the light just comes in there and rattles around the shop. It’s great. I recommend it. It gets hot in the summer, so I shut the shades. In the winter, and fall, and spring, it doesn’t get hot when the light comes in. In the winter, the leaves are gone off the ash trees outside. So it’s a light, sunny shop. In this other section of shop here, there are skylights in that too. See, there’s windows on the east and skylights on the ceiling, and it’s pretty good light in there too.
MS. GOLD: I’ve got to ask you something that I meant to ask you before, and that is, do you see a difference in craftspeople who are trained in universities and those who are working outside? Would you consider yourself a university-trained craftsperson?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, because I worked with Tage Frid.
MS. GOLD: Do you see a difference between people who are trained within the university and those without?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. I think it’s better to have had the training. Sometimes -- and I can’t bring to mind a lot of examples of people that are self trained -- they’re self trained slightly wrong, and they’re working too much off some of their experiences. And I’ll tell them, this is going to trip you up sooner or later, but they take great pride in the fact that they’re self-taught. So it isn’t always successful. You could probably go through the books and lists of people, get some statistics on that, but my feeling is that traditional, formal education in technique and design is important. It gives us the basic groundwork to carry on yourself. Then you can say, I’m self-taught, but I did have three years of school.
MS. GOLD: Well, that’s what you had, right.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, well, I was self taught to begin with, and then my teacher said, I’m doing it all wrong, got to unlearn all this [laughs].
MS. GOLD: Do you see universities as creating different schools of furniture making?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, yes and no. It’s always been that way. For example, RIT has a fair amount of design work going on there, still does. Now, it’s a more contemporary approach, definitely. Now, there’s another school in Boston called North Bennett. It’s a very excellent school, however, their orientation is totally towards traditional pieces called antiques. And so, they do not teach design per se. You would make a chair or a mackintosh – whatever, they are right off from the old masters. And so, they’re getting excellent technical background.
People would come from there, you would hire them because you’d know that they’re very well practiced, trained. But that’s a particular niche. And so, if you were looking for someone with more design training that would create their own new pieces, then you wouldn’t go there, you’d get another type of person that had a background from a school that was more open.
MS. GOLD: Do you see universities as influencing the nature of furniture making?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I think it’s happening outside of the universities. There’s so many people out working now. That’s a good question for the next furniture conference to answer. Who’s making the influence: the schools or the people out working?
MS. GOLD: Well, also the people out working, like yourself in the past, are teaching.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, occasionally. I don’t do much now. But I did just get back from Hawaii, and I’ll do things like that again. I’m teaching again next summer at Penland.
MS. GOLD: Oh, that’s one of the questions I have here to ask you. Have you ever been involved with Penland, Haystack, Arrowmont?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, all of those.
MS. GOLD: So you’ve taught at those places?
MR. OSGOOD: I’ve taught at almost all the schools around the country.
MS. GOLD: Can you describe your experiences there? Are there any exceptional experiences that you want to talk about?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, they vary a lot in the quality of the surroundings and the types of students. For the most part, the student body is going to be mixed. There may be a few that are really total amateurs, and then a few in the class that have obviously got some professional talent. And most of the classes, I considered the week or the two weeks sort of my vacation or time off. So I enjoy working with both types.
Obviously, I like working with the more professional student that’s got a lot of skill, but some of these people with no training and little skill, they’re a lot of fun to work with and they’re interesting people. So they’re more in the category, of okay, it’s a good vacation sort of thing. And if I can help them make something useful for their life, okay, but it’s not moving me ahead. I mean, it’s just sort of entertainment, in a way.
And I don’t mind that now. I mean, it’s not full time. It’s a week or two twice a year. Haystack seems to get a lot of good students. And I haven’t been to Penland too many times, but that appears to be the case there, a higher percentage of people with a lot of skill. And they’re filling a very important niche. There’s a lot of people that want some short classes and, in many cases, can’t take anymore. They can’t take a year off, but they can take two weeks off.
Now, this last summer, I was at Peters Valley Craft School, there was one student there who, I think he’s going to go on and do some good work. He’s about 20 maybe, and really very enthusiastic and involved in what he’s doing. He doesn’t have a lot of skill yet, but he’s showing all the signs of somebody that -- like if I was teaching at Boston University, I’d want to drop a big scholarship on him so we could have a good time working together. I mean, that sort of a student.
MS. GOLD: So as a teacher, in the past, it’s really exciting for you to work with good students.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah.
MS. GOLD: Do you learn from them, yourself?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, a lot of the students that I got at Boston University, it was more a pure group thing. It wasn’t like the teacher who had to spoon-feed the students every dumb thing. They were really people with excellent backgrounds, highly skilled; some of them already had four years of apprenticeship, or they had prior degrees. And the average age was 26, which is a little high. And it was really an amazing astrological occurrence, if you want to put it that way, that we had so many good students. So many of them are out working still. I mean, it started in ’75, and they’re doing good work. And that was good.
Those ten years that I was there, there was a lot of good work that never got made in my shop because I was busy there. But I don’t really mind. I had a really good time working with them, and we talk about that now and then. I see some of them frequently. In fact, this group I belong to here, we’ve got three of them in our auction group this year.
MS. GOLD: The New Hampshire Furniture Masters’ –
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, they’re contributing pieces to that. And my recent trip to Hawaii was because of another student. He had been to Hawaii on the same thing and recommended me. So communication continues.
MS. GOLD: Are there other communities that have been important to you as a craftsperson? You talk about the New Hampshire Master Craftsmen.
MR. OSGOOD: What do you mean communities, though?
MS. GOLD: This question that the Smithsonian’s asked me to cover, and that is, is there a community that has been important to your development as an artist?
MR. OSGOOD: No. I don’t know how to answer that.
MS. GOLD: [Laughs.] Okay.
MR. OSGOOD: If I could figure out how to answer it, I would. Communities, yeah, it’s a group, but I’ve never -- no, I’ve been part of the group of furniture makers, that’s the community. But it’s not a residential community.
MS. GOLD: I think that’s what I meant, not residential, but sort of a community of groups and connections.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah well, I guess if you put it that way, I mean, I am a part of the community of furniture makers. That’s clear.
MS. GOLD: But have you had involvement with national craft organizations, American Craft Council?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, from the very beginning, I’ve been a member of the American Craft Council. I feel it’s very important to be a member of that, just to be part of that. Yeah, you could say that’s a community, and my name listed as a member there. And they have their ups and downs. I think that development fluctuates in a way, or whatever, but yes, they are still representing a lot of us, in some ways.
The Furniture Society has come along now, and I feel that’s very important. That was an important membership move. That’s national or international at this point, and the furniture makers never had this. The potters had it, and the metal people had national organizations, and I think fiber had national organizations, but this is the first time -- and it’s taken four years or so, they’ve developed now into coast-to-coast representation. I think that’s very important.
[Audio break. Tape change.]
MS. GOLD: Donna Gold interviewing Jere Osgood on September 19, 2001. Do you feel like you have any kind of political or social commentary in your work?
MR. OSGOOD: No, I don’t really. I find myself politically independent or more in the middle, so I’m free to choose either side as it comes along rather than definite alignment. But I wouldn’t say that there’s any connection in my work.
MS. GOLD: How about technology? Has that had any impact on your work?
MR. OSGOOD: Well, in a sense, it has, because what I’m doing now wouldn’t have been possible years ago. All of the good glues were developed after or during World War II time, so these lamination processes that I use just wouldn’t have existed prior to 1942, we’ll say. So I came along at the right time wanting to do these things, and so I’m able to create these forms using that lamination technique, which is dependent on the glue. So technologically, that’s right in there.
Otherwise, I don’t use any lasers for shaping. Most all my techniques are very traditional standard shop techniques, except the lamination techniques, which get me rides around the country, because I’ll demonstrate my new techniques.
MS. GOLD: Maybe it was in the article that you wrote. You talked about this a little bit when you were talking about the miniatures, the sense of stance and then eye movement and detail, how you want to detail close-up and the stance may be further away. Am I misunderstanding you?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I think you’re running a couple of things together. The stance that we were talking about -- like this table was an example, the way it’s about to move, and that other big desk that I did, I spent a long time with that trying to get the position good on that, just the stance. That’s one thing. The other one was the way I explained the viewing of furniture, and I don’t know whether I wrote that in either place, and I can go through that roughly.
When you come into a room or a gallery space from 15 or 20, look at the piece of furniture, and you can see it in an easy view, you’re back far enough from it. Then you walk closer, and as you get closer, say, maybe six feet or four feet, you’ll start to see more of the detail, and you’ll know by that time what kind of wood it is, you’ll have an idea of how it’s finished, of how the light’s reflecting off it because it’s finished. And you can pick that up from, you know, eight feet, six feet away. And your appreciation for form, when you’re at 15 feet, you’re seeing silhouette and able to start to get a feeling for the mass of the piece. We’ll say it’s a chest of drawers and how this volume affects the space.
So if you move closer together and you get to 10 feet, you can start to have more of a dialogue with it; you’ll get a better understanding for the strength of this form. And this, I feel, is very important, to be able to get people to look carefully at furniture. Just give it a chance: it will work almost both ways. You’ll see things happening there in the strength of the form. It’s hard to put a figure on it, but maybe around eight or ten feet, you can get a pretty good sense of the form -- is it well balanced here, and is it in an easy line in another area, is that correct. And you pick up the weak spots or the really strong parts in a design.
Now, as you move closer, those things will move out to your peripheral vision. And when you get really close to the piece, then you will start seeing the details in the joinery, the details in the special hardware, you’ll see the birds in the marquetry in clear detail. If there’s marquetry –
MS. GOLD: [Laughs.] With birds.
MR. OSGOOD: With birds. All of these things that will be right there close to you, and the rest of the piece is in your peripheral vision. But when you’re really close there, you’re probably not able to say whether this piece is an example of very fine sculptural form because you’re too close to it. So that’s my journey: from distance out, you need to get these views of it as you move in. You’ll get your understanding of the form between 15 feet and nine-and-a-half feet, or something.
And as soon as you pass that, you may not be able to see the form, the good balance or the bad balance as well. You’ll start seeing the very close-up things. You know, bad workmanship will show when you’re close. There’s a lot of stuff, a lot of things in museums, I think it’s a trick. They spend so much time on these carved birds and silver details, and other funny close-up, small things, I think sometimes they’re trying to trick me into thinking this is a very fine piece. Because if I back up, you’ll see that the actual, the basic form of the piece is just abysmal. I talk about this if I’m teaching, and I try to get students to see this.
MS. GOLD: And then, when you’re dealing with a desk, for instance, then there’s the inside as well as the outside.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah. Most of the inside, you’d see it only close up. That’s been a problem with my desks: Do they display them closed or open?
MS. GOLD: And the shells, at least from the photos, when you open them up, they do have the same sense of a skeletal structure that’s so beautiful. Another concept that I think I read about, and I think you mentioned it, and I thought you might want to talk about it a little bit more, is the sense of three lives of a piece, one being the design and the other being the process of making it, and the other being the actual piece.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, I probably have talked about that. It’s important to me to be involved in those three; it’s terribly important. What I have, though, when I’m done, is the design and the process. I don’t normally have the piece, and in most cases, I don’t need the piece. I mean, I don’t have any use for it. But to me, the experience of working on a design and being with the piece through all its process of creation, I can’t sell that. It’s not that I wouldn’t sell it. It’s just what I have and it’s what I really get from making the pieces. I’m not trying to accumulate unsold pieces that I didn’t want to sell, I just wanted to make it so I could have a piece. I don’t work that way, and I don’t think I ever have. I’ve always been happy with the concept of coming up with a design, developing it, and then helping it get made. This, to me, is the excitement of the piece.
Now, it’s really nice if this piece can be sold, because it brings in some money. And if people really like it, that’s even a bonus. So it’s not that that doesn’t matter to me. I mean, I like to see a piece go to where people enjoy it and they’ll say to me six years later how much they like it, and this happens a lot. You might hear other sculptors say this too. I didn’t pick it up from anybody, it’s just been my way of development over the years. Other people are also involved in processing.
MS. GOLD: I think that’s part of being an artist, isn’t it. It’s the making, not the object. But when you’re making something, it’s such a tactile process. Is there any one part of it that you most love to do?
MR. OSGOOD: Oh, it’s the visual. Yeah, I make these great parts. The legs on this desk, they were a marvelous revelation when I pulled them off the machine, and they curve in three planes. Anyway, I looked at them for the longest time, and I really enjoyed that form. Actually, I hadn’t completely seen that. I had made a pine one, and I don’t know, I felt it was kind of crude, but I went ahead anyway, feeling that I was right -- I didn’t fine sand it and shape it as far as I should have.
But when these came out of the templates, that was exciting. This is a visual thing. Yes, it’s sort of tactile. And it’s true, many of the parts of pieces like that, in the shapes, they may suggest new forms, another piece, a curving door, or a back panel, or something. It may give me another idea that I should go and write down, either as a few words or a sketch. And it’s pretty much a visual thing that’s happening there during the process. You may get a different response on that from fiber people.
MS. GOLD: Oh yeah, that’s interesting.
MR. OSGOOD: Because a lot of that is tactile.
MS. GOLD: You know, in talking, you seem to have a sense of vision and also organic environment, environmental interests. Would you say that there’s a spirituality in your work, in any sense? Is doing expressive work a part of that greater sense?
MR. OSGOOD: I’ve never really thought that. If someone said, “Your work is very spiritual,” I really wouldn’t know how to respond. I don’t know [laughs]. People have said pieces are very sensual, and they do say they’re tactile -- they have to touch them -- and that does come up. But spiritual is a --
MS. GOLD: Maybe not in the piece, but in the creation.
MR. OSGOOD: It’s one of those things that I almost feel that I don’t have a good enough command of the language, because this may very well be what’s happening with my better pieces or other people’s better pieces, that the pieces shift over into a new dimension, into this spiritual dimension. But I don’t think I could tell you how they got there. If this occurs to people, this is wonderful, but it’s not something that I guess I can plan on or think about myself. I think I’d have to have somebody tell me that that’s what I did when I did the piece. And I certainly have good feelings about that, but I don’t feel I’m directly participating in a crossover to a spiritual understanding. Is there another way you could ask the question? Maybe I’m not coming at it from the right direction.
MS. GOLD: I actually think that you’ve answered the question. The question actually is, Does religion or a sense of spirituality play a role in your art? But I think what I was asking was, when you are in the creative process, is the creative process to you a moment of sort of moving out into another plane?
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, if you want to call that spiritual, that happens all the time, yeah.
MS. GOLD: I don’t know if I want to call it spiritual or not.
MR. OSGOOD: Yeah, sure, that’s exactly true. I lose track of time and sensation, there’s no doubt about that. I can go off in my sketchbook or my drawings and I might not hear you come in, or I might not hear the phone. I know my hearing’s gone, but that’s beside the point. Time stops and you just sort of flow in with it if you’re going with it, with an idea or a feeling that’s developing. Sure, yeah, I do that. I also, over the years, I can hallucinate or drop down to the next level, which I’ve forgotten the name of very easily. Is it Delta? I don’t know; I do that very easily. And it’s sometimes alarming.
I have gone to a couple of therapists for my neck -- I have a problem with the bone there -- and sometimes I’m just gone. Then I realized it, it’s sort of the same thing that I get if I’m drawing or I’m developing an idea. And I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of that as spiritual. It’s some kind of another dimension or another place my mind goes, but that place has always been there. I mean, I’m just able to move in and out of it. The birds outside do this at night. I finally figured out that’s where they go. You know there’s all these little birds flying around during the day: you don’t see them at night. They go in that other space. You wait; they’ll tell us that’s what happens years from now.
Yes, it’s true, designers lose track of time. I’m probably not the only one. And that’s what it’s called, also. It’s great. You can start drawing -- so it’s 8:30, oh, it’s 11:00. How did it get to 11:00? Sure, I like that. That’s why I said, I like being part of the process and totally absorbe