Chester Cornett

I’ve been home from my most recent Lost Art Press workshop-trip now for a week. I just made it into the shop for real today, but took no photos. Christmas presents. So photos later of those. Maybe.

But I started sorting photos from the past month or so. I made another field trip with the Boy Wonder, aka Brendan Gaffney https://www.instagram.com/burnheartmade/ to see more of Chester Cornett’s chairs. This time we went to the Mathers Museum at Indiana University. I’ll just post photos with captions/notes. The lighting conditions were tough. So, horrid color, real high ISO. These photos aren’t going to win any prizes.

Here’s Brendan for scale, measuring a 3-slat high chair/bar stool. There’s one of these in Alexander’s book, but it’s not this chair. I think this one was sassafrass, very lightweight wood. Harder rungs, they might be hickory, I forget.

This one’s white oak. A 3-slat chair. Chester often bent the rear seat rung to mimic the bent slats. JA wrote to never include sapwood and heartwood in the same stick. Chester didn’t learn chairmaking from a book.

Same chair. Side view.

You can tell this is a 3-slat chair because Chester wrote 1, 2, 3 on the slats.

Another little 3-slat chair. Painted, probably by the owner, Chester didn’t paint them. I like how the paint wore away & highlighted the drawknife work.

A 6-slat rocker. I think this one was sassafrass again. Side view – a real nice chair, his drawknife work was excellent.

All that detail is knife-work. The faux turnings, the giant finials, all the pegs.

Maybe if you click this photo to enlarge it, you’ll see the numbers 1-6 on the slats.

The numbers are in this view too. The layout for the slat mortises is pencil too.

The details on all those rungs, even the rear ones.

The bookcase rocker. What a monstrosity. I’ve built some ugly, heavy chairs in my day. But nothing like this.

Brendan for scale again. The chair is smaller than you might think. The shelves are maybe 6/4 stock. The shelves just above the seat are hinged to access compartments on each side.

“Old Kentucky made buy…

…Chester Cornetts Hands”

Thanks to Brendan for hauling me around & showing me these iconic chairs. Here’s our first trip from this past summer – https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/chester-cornett-chairs/

I first saw photos of Chester Cornett’s chairs in Alexander’s Make a Chair from a Tree in 1978; but didn’t know it. For various reasons, some of the chairs in that book are attributed, some are not. There’s three of them in there; here’s one:

Some years later, Drew Langsner showed us a VHS of Chester, called “Hand Carved” produced by Appalshop, a non-profit dedicated to “document, disseminate, and revitalize the lasting traditions and contemporary creativity of the region.” That film is where I first learned the story of Chester. I guess Alexander then showed me The Hand-Made Object and Its Maker a book by Michael Owen Jones. This was published in 1975, and expanded and revised as Craftsmen of the Cumberlands: Tradition and Creativity in 1989.

So when I went out to Lost Art Press last week for our box-making class, the day off after the class entailed a trip to the Kentucky Folk Art Center https://www.moreheadstate.edu/Caudill-College-of-Arts,-Humanities-and-Social-Sci/Kentucky-Folk-Art-Center in Morehead to see some of Chester’s chairs.Chris Schwarz and Brendan Gaffney had been on a Chester binge in recent years – here’s a blog search at Lost Art Press for Chester Cornett https://blog.lostartpress.com/?s=chester+cornett

Brendan was my guide, and he’s not only seen a lot of Chester’s chairs; he’s made a version of one of the 4-rocker/8-legged chairs – https://www.burn-heart.com/fatman-poptart-rocker/onf4ok366nyfz8kmkjpyi2rd4c3cft

This white oak rocker astounded me. Virtuoso craft.

Those rear posts are probably around 1 3/4″ or more in “diameter”; we estimated the mortises for the arms and stretchers to be about 3/4″ – so not delicate in any way.

I forget the whole inscription; Brendan translated it for me. This is some of it, I might have some of it garbled. The price, $90, is also written the top slat.

“Made Buy
Chester Cornett
______ ________
Engles Mill
Trouble Creek Kentucky”

Now -before anyone makes fun of this chair – I’d like to see you make it with a handful of tools. A four-rocker, eight-legged walnut rocking chair with hickory bark seat.

This one is walnut & hickory bark. The seat rungs might be hickory too.

The most basic chair is itself a beauty. I think this is what Chester called a “settin’ chair”.

The relief shaved in the rear post to make it easier to bend is in the radial plane here, not the growth ring plane like JA always did. I just was looking at some of Kenneth Kortemeier’s chairs, and was planning on swiping this idea from him. Then here it is on Chester’s too.

The front post, oriented just like JA taught us, medullary rays bisecting the angle between the front and side rungs.

It was amazing to see these chairs in person. Regardless of the design debate about his over-blown rockers, Chester was often in full control of his tools in making a chair. The oak rocker here is a perfect example. I’ve thought of him as an idiot-savant whose gift is chair-making. His sad life was a struggle; but he was a natural with a drawknife and brace and bit.

Here’s a feature on Chester from the Cincinnati Magazine https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/features/chester-cornett-humble-chair-maker-mad-genius/