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Jim Dillon Interviews Roger Cash
Like
me, and a list of other furniture builders I could rattle
off, Roger Cash started an academic career in the humanities
(philosophy, in his case) before becoming a professional woodworker.
Fifteen years after taking this new direction, Roger has a
well-established one-person studio in Eynsham, a village just
outside Oxford, England. He's still close to a great center
of learning, and still has plenty of academic contacts and
clients, but one doesn't look at a portfolio of his work and
say "This is obviously the work of a former philosophy postgrad!"
Instead, one is struck first by his confident, bold use of
different colors and figures of wood as a graphic medium.
Next, the careful, quiet underlying proportions of the whole
piece emerge, sometimes almost camouflaged by the overtly
graphic aspect of Roger's design, other times in complete,
simple unison.
Having looked at several pieces in person, both finished and
in-process, I must add that they feel less "designey" than
I've described them here, or than they come across in photographs.
Roger Cash furniture is much more approachable and easy to
imagine living with. It is also executed at a very high standard
of craftsmanship. The impression created by the portfolio,
then, is that this craftsman must have been steeped in all
aspects of woodworking, from design through finishing, since
a very early age. Both on the merits of his work, and for
the interest of comparing notes with a woodworker in another
country, I wanted to learn more about Roger, so writing for
Wood News Online
was a perfect excuse for interrogation.
Read Jim's interview with Roger
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Table saws are everywhere. Most of us
start woodworking with a table saw. Nevertheless, most of
my homeowner friends haven't made even the simplest improvements
to their saws. Nobody told them how.
