Intrepid Makers: Brian Newell – FineWoodworking

Brian Newell

Brian Newell’s furniture has the power and mystery of a dream—an emotional force that can be at once thrilling and frightening. With its bulging, quilted, compound-curved forms and its stunning pierced carving, it relentlessly seeks new ground both technically and aesthetically. Without abandoning utility, it takes us into territory we’ve never visited before.

Newell was raised in a working-class family near Flint, Mich.; he learned furniture making under James Krenov on the rugged coast of Northern California; he honed his fabricating skills as a patternmaker in the model-car industry in Chicago; and he lived and built furniture for 10 years just outside Tokyo. But the astonishing forms and imagery of Newell’s furniture are native to nowhere but his imagination.

His relentless inventiveness as a form-giver requires an equal fearlessness as a craftsman. And his solutions to never-before-posed technical quandaries constitute a high-wire act nearly as absorbing as the pieces themselves. His approach to furniture, he acknowledges, “is a little risky.” Technically, it’s like “careening down the road, almost ready to lose it at every corner.” And he embraces that. “I love engineering, but I also love spontaneity, and I think that suits me a little better. I can’t plan five minutes ahead in my life, and that’s the way I make furniture too.”

A Brian Newell piece can seem to peel the cover off the maker’s subconscious to expose a world that blends the beautiful with the bestial. In his furniture, there are occasional traces of Arts and Crafts structure or Danish Modern lines, but mostly it feels like Newell and nothing else.

The otherness of his work, though, has at least one very familiar spring: “I share with Krenov the love of wood,” he says. “Sounds banal, but that’s the starting point of everything. Crazy about the stuff. My happiest hours are spent bounding around on piles of logs and crawling through stacks. If there’s a shrub or a hedge that nobody has tried to use before somewhere in Texas, I want to know about it. I want to try it. I want to run a gouge through it.”

Brian Newell: Krenov-inspired cabinets and beyond

In this gallery, Anissa Kapsales shares some of her favorite pieces made by one of her favorite makers, Brian Newell.

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