Artwork Title: David Pye (1914–1993)

David Pye (1914–1993), 1974

Ruskin Spear

David Pye, woodworker, designer and writer, born 18 November 1914, Professor of Furniture Design, Royal College of Art 1964-74, OBE 1985. Books include The Things We See: Ships 1950, The Nature of Design 1964, The Nature and Art of Workmanship 1968, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design 1978, married 1944 Pamela Waller (died 1992; one son, one daughter), died 1 January 1993. David Pye was a maker of wooden bowls and boxes, the teacher of several generations of furniture designers, one of the most respected British craftsmen, and among the few to write about the crafts in an unsentimental fashion. Pye trained at the Architectural Association in the heyday of Modernism; reacting against the prevailing enthusiasm for concrete, he spent much of his time building boats, and decided to specialize in wooden buildings. But the war intervened, and service in the navy, leaving, for example, a school for a Yorkshire mining community (articulated 'like an alligator' to compensate for ground subsidence) unbuilt. 'After the war,' he told Crafts magazine in 1976, 'there wasn't going to be any wood for building for a long time, so I thought I'd stick to wood, and ditch buildings.' Sticking to wood meant designing furniture for industrial production, and making carvings and, especially, large carved bowls and dishes and small turned boxes. It also meant blacksmithing - forging tools not easily available otherwise - and inventing: by 1950 Pye had built the 'fluting engine' with which he cut the smooth, rhythmic flutes on the inner surface of his bowls. In the Seventies, it was joined by a smaller machine to engrave patterns on the lids of boxes. These machines - essentially guided hand-tools - embody, in a way, the concerns of Pye's writings and of his craftwork. Their purpose is to bring diversity to the object, changing and enlivening the quality of its surface, and offering the eye something to focus on intermediate in scale between the object's large form and the minute texture of the wood itself. Pye invented a terminology for different kinds of workmanship: 'workmanship of risk' (which involves a constant risk of failure), 'workmanship of certainty' (as in much industrial production, where the process should guarantee the result), 'free workmanship' (avoiding precise reproduction of a design) and 'highly regulated workmanship' (precise reproduction). The fluting engine produces moderately free workmanship, and though mechanically aided, fluting is still workmanship of risk; Pye perhaps took some sardonic pleasure in illustrating in his book on workmanship a bowl where one flute, cut a little too deep, jumps out at the eye from its shallower neighbors. ...By the 1980s - perhaps because of The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (1978), which combined material from the earlier book with a firm statement of the designer's personal responsibility in enriching the environment - Pye's writings had become something of a cult among a new (and still small) tribe of crafts writers as well as craftspeople. That there is now less sheer slop written about the crafts than there was in the 1970s must owe something to Pye's almost underground influence. But in considering the writings, one should not forget that much of his woodwork is, quite simply, beautiful. There are examples in the V & A, at the Crafts Study Centre, Bath, and the Crafts Council's loan collection. Those inspired to read Pye's works should go and look first. [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-david-pye-1476905.html]
Uploaded on Mar 26, 2018 by Suzan Hamer

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