In Wiltshire, not far from Trowbridgeshireton, beside
a water meadow in the curtilage of a farm that's
home to a small community of craftspeople, you'll
find David Oldfield. Or rather, you probably won't:
there's no sign on the door, no giveaway stacks of timber.
“No-one knows I'm here,” he says with the dolorous
satisfaction of the successful recluse. Even if you do
discover his workshop, the personality behind the door
isn't easy to pin down.
He describes himself as a cabinetmaker and designer,
and for David the two are inseparable: “I never accept
drawings. Well, you've got to have some freedom,
haven't you?” And this freedom is a theme to which he
returns frequently because, in David's mind at least, a
cabinetmaker-designer is rarely ever free.
On first acquaintance, you wouldn't imagine
that this is a condition that troubles David. For
a start, he has the energy of a free spirit. Oh
sure, brought to a standstill by the camera, as
he is here, you might guess that he's a
sexagenarian and a grandfather. But see him in
pipe-lighting, match-tossing, expansively
gesturing action and he has the vitality of
someone far younger. As he leaps from idea to
reminiscence to argument David speaks in the
way that some people sketch, with quick bold
strokes that capture the thought before it's
lost; his eyebrows semaphore emphasis, like
heavy underlining. So it's: “Come in.” Allencompassing
gesture. “Workshop. Very cold;
sorry. Only just lit the stove. Coffee?” Then he's
off on a hunt for mugs to wash, sketching - I
mean talking - furiously as he goes. Coffee,
milk and water are more or less spooned and
poured into the same mug, then David's
reinstalled on his stool by the stove but no less
in motion for all that: undertaking a
commission, he explains, is an opportunity for
adventure, and David knows all about
adventurous journeys.
The long and winding road
Though he'd been interested in woodwork
since he was a boy, “in schools in the Sixties,
anything creative was considered
unimportant.” He did manage a year at the
Winchester School of Art, “but I was shoved
into civil engineering by my Dad, who thought
that solid, practical training was what I
needed.” When the engineering company went
bankrupt and his father died, however, David
went into what he calls a 'state of shock'. He
moved to London and tried to live on his wits
as a folksinger, sharing a house with one of the
Strawberry Hill Boys, the band that went on to
become The Strawbs. But increasingly he found
that London and a life of no money and no
sleep was becoming claustrophobic. It's easy to
imagine, then, how he found himself on a
dockside, with a packed trunk and no idea
where the ship he was about to board was
headed. “All the way round,” the bo'sun told
him. “All the way round the ****in' world.”
And that's how David ended up in New Zealand
for 15 years, working mainly as a production
manager for a film company - “a hard-drinking
lifestyle spent on the run,” as he describes it. In
a chance visit to a furnituremaker's workshop,
however, “my lifestyle changed all of an
instant” - he was seduced by the seeming
peace and quiet. “I decided to resign and learn
to make furniture. Frightened myself to death.
The day I left the film company, though, I
realised that the most successful way to live
your life is to do something individually.” It was
also the day that he began to realise just how
hard it is to achieve that idealised life of
cabinetmaking peace and simplicity - even in a
workshop rented to you by an old dowager for
the princely sum of $15 a week!
Back to Bightly
When David returned to England in 1979 he
was what he calls, “a neo-colonial who didn't
play the game as it was played in the more
conservative motherland.” For example, he
quizzed John Makepiece on the life of the
designer-maker, never thinking that the John
Makepieces of the world don't like to be
cross-examined about the living they make. “I
had a head full of weird ideas,” he recalls, “but
I didn't know where I fitted in.”
When David returned to England in 1979 he
was what he calls, “a neo-colonial who didn't
play the game as it was played in the more
conservative motherland.” For example, he
quizzed John Makepiece on the life of the
designer-maker, never thinking that the John
Makepieces of the world don't like to be
cross-examined about the living they make. “I
had a head full of weird ideas,” he recalls, “but
I didn't know where I fitted in.”
The unvarnished truth is that, back then, he
probably didn't fit into the world of
conventional commercial furnituremaking.
Those 'weird ideas' were the product of his
unrequited enthusiasm for Expressionism, and,
“Expressionism has nothing to do with
convention. It is the world of 'if' where a chair,
say, can be anything as long as you can sit in it.
You're free to experiment with anything you
like; to make shapes any way you want; to be
foolish, bizarre, humorous, useless or
whatever. Sadly, I've done little of it
[Moonbase One, shown above, is one of David's
purely Expressionist pieces] but while indulging
in this genre, I have felt free of the normal
structured existence known to most of us.”
And there's the rub. The reason that he's
done so little of it is that the freedom of mind
and freedom of time to create speculatively is
dearly bought, perhaps too dearly.
“Expressionism is as near to art as a
cabinetmaker can get” - he cites the Fred Baier
sideboard that was made just as Picasso
painted it, and becomes animated at the
thought of Carl Handy's wilting violins
(GW193:50) — “but as far as I know, most
Expressionist pieces are made speculatively,
which is the financial kiss of death. The pieces
are usually only purchased by rich collectors.”
Ann Hartree cautioned him against extremes
of artistic idealism when he visited her Prescott
Gallery in Banbury shortly after returning to
the UK. If he was set on making speculative
pieces, she told him, then he was going to
need some sort of alternative income if he was
to survive.
“The tragedy of being a cabinetmaker,”
David reflects, “is that everything you make
has to have a use, or a usefulness is expected
of the object that you make. Sculptors and 3D
artists don't suffer from this, so why should
we?” Well, you can question the way things
are all you like, but at the end of the day, says
David, “you have to make up your mind about
what you want to be.”
David made up his mind - he wanted to be
busy, creative, but solvent - and for a dozen
called Henry, by the way— will add three days'
of extra work to the three months that the job
is already expected to take.
A small measure of freedom
All of which brings us back to a cold workshop
and a David Oldfield who has survived three
recessions since the day that he imagined
making furniture was a way to achieve peace
and quiet. “Cabinetmaking is an honest and
honourable trade, profession, whatever you
want to call it. It's a good life, but a tough life.
Very precarious; you know what debt is all
about. And that simplicity,” he reflects, “is one
of the hardest things to achieve. I feel sad for
the things I haven't done, and I yearn to make
things that I probably never will.”
He hasn't done and may never do these
things because while he's single-minded about
his work - “My work is my life. I have a wife
and three children, and sparks have flown over
the time I spend in the workshop” - he's
always stopped short of the selfishness that he
believes characterises many of the artists
who're remembered by history.
“Still, you have to do what you can,” he says.
And what David can do is to take control of the
timber and the design, which is in turn a way,
he believes, of achieving freedom by controlling
and shaping your environment. “If you can
work a material that wants to move and fight
back then you've achieved something in a
world where so many of us are buffeted by our
work, or by the bank manager, or whatever.”
Does that all sound a little dour? It isn't
meant to. It's simply supposed to explain that
David Oldfield isn't easy to find because he
occupies a creative space between the
repetitive work of commercial cabinetmaking;
a space whose entrance is just as wide as the
latitude afforded by his client's trust. From the
outside, it may look awfully narrow, but step
inside, where you can see the freedom he has
to indulge his imagination, and you find that
there's room enough to last a lifetime.
