(cheery music) - Welcome to the "Volunteer Woodworker."

I'm your host Charles Brock.

Come with me as we drive the back roads bringing you the story of America's finest woodworkers.

(cheery music) We're going to Woodbury, Tennessee to meet Alf Sharp.

Alf left law school and got involved in many things period, especially period furniture at a level very few reach.

His furniture can be found in fine homes and collections like the Hermitage.

He will share his story and a new project with us today.

(cheery music) - [Announcer] Volunteer Woodworker is funded in part by since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving and CNC application.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC free non-toxic milk paint available in 56 colors.

Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens.

(cheery music) - Alf.

- Hi Chuck.

Welcome.

- Well thank you.

There's nothing so comforting as this porch with all of the wildlife out here, the birds, the chimes, which we'll probably hear soon.

This is the setting for the artist.

I think that's important.

- Well, I do too, I do too.

It was my dream from the very start to have my shop at home, and it took me about a decade to get that, to accomplish that.

- Well, it certainly is a restful place, a place to put together your thoughts and your visions and then take 'em to that shop, which we'll see later.

Besides this inspiring setting here, who were some of the people that inspired you early on?

What inspired you to be Alf Sharp, woodworker?

- Well, I didn't even really start to think about woodworking until my early twenties.

I was in law school for a short time.

I quickly realized that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

So I dropped out of law school and just sort of bummed around for a couple of years, picking up jobs here and there, and I ended up on a carpentry crew and everything just clicked.

I just understood what I was doing right away.

I got it.

Before long, I was doing the interior trim and the built-in cabinet work.

And at that point, I started looking at furniture differently.

Well, that's made out of wood too.

How'd they do that?

- Yes.

- And so I do remember, I do remember one book that was in my parents' library that fascinated me from an early age.

I don't know when I started looking at this book, but it was a book about English furniture and in it, it had a two page spread of this secretary, this desk and bookcase as they were called back then, we call 'em secretaries now, this unbelievable tour de force.

I don't even know why it fascinated me so much before I got interested in furniture, but it did, it was just so beautiful, such a beautiful thing.

And there was this two page spread in the book of the interior of this secretary done in an architectural 18th century style.

And I looked at that time and time again.

And then of course when I got interested in furniture, I looked back at it again and said, oh my goodness, how in the world did they do that?

So those were early influences.

I remember going to a crafts fair here in Nashville early on and seeing a contemporary piece by a woodworker from Memphis, I forget his name, I'm sorry, but it was a great piece of furniture, it was a coffee table.

The top would had a long spear shape or leaf shape to it and then the pedestal came out of one end of the leaf and went down and terminated underneath the table in such a way as to balance the whole table in a big frog's foot.

- Wow.

- And the whole table was made out of zebra wood.

It was a beautiful wood that I'd never seen before and I was struck by that.

And so here I was, I was interested in both contemporary and traditional furniture and remained interested in both contemporary and traditional furniture all these years later.

- Alf, your involvement in period furniture has been huge over the years.

The American Society of Period Furniture Makers, you're one of the winners of their Cartouche Awards.

- That's right.

That was a great honor.

That was a great honor.

Well, it involves teaching and being able to advance period furniture making.

- Yeah.

- And yes, that is a great honor.

- You've also been involved with period furniture at Andrew Jackson's home, the Hermitage.

Tell us about that.

- I've done a lot of things for the Hermitage.

Over the past 30 or more years, I've done quite a bit of work for the Hermitage.

I've done both furniture inside the house and architectural work such as all the exterior doors, the capitals on the columns on the front of the house.

I did the Venetian blinds that are in the house.

This was one of the first houses in the south to have original Venetian blinds.

Of course, the originals were gone, but they knew that the house had Venetian blinds.

So I made a bunch of old fashioned Venetian blinds with the little pulleys made out of bone.

- [Chuck] Wow.

- To be authentic.

- George Washington's chair.

- Yes.

There was a chair that George Washington owned first that Jackson bought from Washington's estate and brought to the Hermitage with him.

So the same chair had been both in Mount Vernon, Washington's place, and in the Hermitage.

Early on, the Jackson family sold the chair back to Mount Vernon where it exists now, but there needed to be one in the Hermitage to replicate the circumstances of when Jackson lived there after the presidency.

And so I went up to Mount Vernon, measured, took a survey of a, a complete survey of the chair and reproduced one for the Hermitage as well.

- That is an awesome project, and one that I've just enjoyed seeing and enjoyed hearing about.

- It's an early swiveling chair.

- Yes.

- It's an office chair that swivels.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well what a great project.

You've been involved in so many.

You're both a wood carver, sculptor, and you do some contemporary work too.

- I do.

I do.

I enjoy contemporary work.

In fact, when I first started, I imagined that I would be a contemporary furniture maker.

I thought I would do that first but it became apparent, I had a family and so I had to actually make a living at it.

It became quickly apparent to me in the mid south in the '70's, that if you wanted to make a living at woodworking, you made period furniture.

And so I learned all I could about period furniture.

I had three or four really good mentors who were not really cabinet makers, they were antiques dealers and collectors who knew the styles, who knew what was good in the period and what was not so good, and they showed me what to strive for as far as proportion and line and quality of workmanship.

And then I just, by trial and error, I learned the techniques necessary to make the furniture.

- It's just doing the work.

- Yeah.

- You do the work and then have some benchmark to strive for.

And if you stay after it, if you're diligent- - Yeah.

- You have a chance to be maybe an Alf Sharp.

- Well it did, I'm very blessed, it came pretty naturally to me.

I didn't have to struggle.

I mean I made mistakes and mistakes are very instructional, but I was able to pick up the techniques and the sense of style and proportion pretty quickly.

- You know, I see that as being in alignment with who you're supposed to be.

- Yeah, I do too.

I'm very blessed to have been able to do that.

I can't bear the thought of what my life would've been like had I gone on and finished law school and become a lawyer.

It shudders, makes me shudder.

- Alf, is there something about your career that was, you felt was the hardest?

What was the biggest problem?

- You know, Chuck, there were techniques that were hard to learn, that took a lot of trial and error, but the hardest thing that I had to learn and that I don't feel like I ever mastered was the marketing part.

It didn't come naturally to me.

Whenever I was not working at the bench, I felt like I was not productive.

And so all the time spent trying to generate customers and generate business and generate interest in my business was, it was not natural to me and it was not comfortable for me and I struggled with that my whole career.

- Yeah.

Was it easier for people to come to you than for you to go to them?

- Yeah.

Well, fortunately after a few years, I started to develop enough word of mouth that I was able to keep a waiting list of a year or two of projects without having to do a whole lot of marketing.

I still had to periodically visit designers and collectors and dealers and museums and just remind them that I was theirs, that I was doing the work.

But no, fortunately, I didn't have to pursue marketing on a daily basis.

- Now you're working on a really great project and you've got it out in your shop.

Are you gonna show us?

- It is.

It's a fascinating end of career project.

It's one of the most involved I've ever done, especially as far as carving is concerned.

It's a massive billiard table for the Belmont Mansion in Nashville.

- I can't wait to see it.

Let's go.

- All right.

(cheery music) - Well Alf, these gigantic legs, I guess are part of the billiard or pool table from the Belmont Mansion.

- That's right, that's right.

The original billiard table had eight legs.

And when they broke it down and made a desk out of it, they just discarded four of the original eight legs.

So I have four original legs to use as examples and I'm carving four more legs to look as much like the originals as I can.

- And this is an original here?

- This is an original here and these are three of the ones that I've already carved.

- So you're working on a fourth one, which is over on your bench and this we'll get to later.

- We'll do a little work on it, yeah.

- Yeah.

But so there are eight legs and what tied them together?

- Well, there were very fancy skirts or aprons that linked all the eight legs together.

They had crotch cherry veneer on them and then carving on top of that and they all linked together with knockdown hardware because this table would've been impossible to transport or to move into any building assembled.

- Sure, yeah.

- So it all mocks down and the aprons link the legs together and then there's an internal structure that holds up the slate.

I'll not do the slate or the felt.

We'll have a pool company, a company that specializes in making pool tables do that part of the work.

- Well, this is just an awesome project and the Belmont Mansion that it came out of, a little bit of the history there?

- This table was in the mansion in 1850.

And at the time, this was one of the finest houses in America.

- In Nashville, Tennessee?

- In Nashville, Tennessee, by far, one of the finest houses in America.

And this table was an example of the extent to which they went to build it and decorate it.

It's in the Rococo revival style, which means that it's, the Rococo style took place in the middle of the 18th century.

This house and these pieces were built in the middle of the 19th century.

So they took the original Rococo style in the middle of the 18th century and blew it up so that you've got all of this, all of this carving is very high relief.

The original Rococo style, the carving was very low relief, very close to the surface, highly detailed, but very tight to the surface of the furniture.

- This is deep.

- This is just all off the surface of the furniture.

It's a completely different kind of carving.

It's been very challenging for me to make the shift to this Rococo revival style.

- And what are some of the elements that are carved into these legs?

- Well, this is a cartouche, that's an 18th century, I mean, that's a throwback to the 18th century.

These are canthus leaves, that's a throwback to the 18th century.

These rose petals, I guess they're roses, that's more of a 19th century element.

You didn't see too many flowers in 18th century Rococo carving.

The sea scrolls, the foot scrolls and the sea scrolls here on the edges of the piece, those are all original Rococo elements blown up, like I said.

- So is there a picture of the billiard table that you're working from?

- No, there's not that I know of.

I think they would've shown me if they had one.

I have a picture of the desk, the end of the desk before I disassembled it to bring it here to start working on it but I've seen no picture of the original billiard table.

I think they have a drawing of a generic sort of an example that they showed me once but nothing specific to this table.

- So the Belmont Mansion is now part of Belmont University?

- That's right.

- Yes.

And so they wanted to reconstruct the interiors of the mansion.

- Exterior and the interior.

Yeah, they're doing a really top notch restoration of the entire house, all the original surfaces.

There are lots of grain painting in the house, lots of faux marbling on the baseboards and the floors.

Some of the floors are painted in checkerboard patterns and other parts of the floors are covered in painted canvas, which was a popular kind of a rug back then.

They've filled the house with a lot of the, if not the actual original Belter furniture, they've got a lot of Belter furniture.

Henry Belter was the foremost furniture maker of the mid 19th century in New York.

The original house had hundreds of pieces of Henry Belter furniture in it.

- So this is quite a big part of that restoration, especially a billiard table.

Alf, you're working on the fourth leg, it's on your bench and you're gonna show us a little bit about how you do it.

- I'm gonna try.

- All right, let's go see.

Alf, this is a massive piece of cherry.

It's not easy to carve.

- No, cherry is not easy to carve.

I wish they had used mahogany instead.

They could have achieved the same color with mahogany, but they chose cherry and so this has got to be cherry and cherry is a difficult wood to carve.

- And these are deep, deep carvings.

- Yeah, big, heavy, deep carvings.

- Let's see how it works.

- Okay.

So we're gonna carve this element here, we're gonna do some work on it and we're gonna start by creating this spine that goes up the middle of the leaf.

- Okay.

- So we take a V tool.

- And so relief carving is you're actually relieving the area- - Yes.

- Around the element?

- That's right, it's a subtractive process.

Most woodworking is a subtractive process, not an additive process.

That's about where the grain changes direction, where I started going.

Now I've got to turn around and go this way.

- And if you don't, it'll rip out the grain and- - Right.

- You don't want that.

- All right.

So that's that vein?

- That's the spine in the middle of the leaf.

- [Chuck] Oh, wow.

- Now we'll take a tool that I've got over here, this is called a back bent spoon, and we'll round over that spine.

- [Chuck] And here again, you've got to work with the grain.

- [Alf] With the grain.

- And I imagine your tools are well honed- - Oh, they have to be.

- And sharp?

- They have to be sharp.

- [Chuck] It's just polished.

- Yeah, yeah, they, I polish the edges.

- [Chuck] So I see that you're always connected to the piece and it looks like your hands have specific jobs.

- [Alf] That's right.

It's a two-handed job mostly.

One hand is doing the pushing and one hand is holding the tool back from going too far.

So one hand is acting kind of as a break.

Sometimes it's just acting as a brace, but often it's acting as a break to keep the tool from jumping way ahead.

- Nice finished cuts, the surfaces are so good.

You don't want to have to sand this whole thing.

- No.

This piece gets some sanding but the ideal in carving like this is not to have to sand anything, to have everything be a tooled surface, but the surfaces on these originals are so smooth that I know that they did some sanding on them.

There you go.

Be careful not to catch the point there of the chisel too much in the wood.

- Okay.

- Try to keep the point of the chisel out of the wood so that you're just working in the middle two thirds of the, there you go.

- Like that.

- Beautiful.

- Oh man, that was a great tip because otherwise it'll just catch and dig in.

- Uh huh, right, right.

- It even feels good.

Let me see if I can clean that just a bit here.

Nice tools and they cut so well, but they work better in your hands.

(Alf chuckles) Thank you, Alf.

- Sure, Chuck.

- This is a great project.

Can't wait to see it finished.

- I can't either.

- I'm gonna be heading down the road to find a story of another great woodworker.

See you next time on the Volunteer Woodworker.

(cheery music) - [Announcer] Volunteer Woodworker is funded in part by since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving and CNC application.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC free non-toxic milk paint available in 56 colors.

Milk paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin on wood decorative arts.

Visit charlesbrockchairmaker.com for all you need to know about woodworking.

If you'd like to learn even more, free classes in a variety of subjects are available for streaming from charlesbrockchairmaker.com.

(cheery music) (inspiring music)