David Marks

A life-long student and teacher

BY JOHN LAVINE

David Marks is standing at the tablesaw in his northern California shop, ripping a plank for a small coffee table project. As the piece comes off the saw, he lifts it up, and gesturing toward it, opens his mouth to speak.

     “Cut!” interrupts the director, and everything on the set stops. The camera crew relaxes.

     “David, you need to hold the piece a little higher and to the right so we can get your face in the shot, that's it, and move your finger along the lower edge as you say the measurement…and don't forget to smile.” Marks grabs another piece of wood and steps back to the saw.

     “Okay, ready on the set,” the director calls out. “Take 12!”

     This is not your typical day in the life of a woodworker. For that matter, it isn't a typical day in the life of David Marks anymore either, though for an intense three-year period it was his whole life, day and night. How Marks wound up behind klieg lights is a tale full of twists and turns, one that reveals his uncanny ability to take each unexpected development as an opportunity. His story begins a bit more humbly, in a chicken coop in rural northern California sometime in the early 1970s.

     Marks had moved to the West Coast from his native New Jersey after high school. He studied painting and sculpture at Cabrillo College in the Santa Cruz, California area for a few years, then drifted up to Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, where his brother and some friends were living. He was working odd jobs, trying to figure out his future, when his boss told him one day that he was drafting him to do some carpentry work. First, though, he had to tear down some chicken coops for the wood. The pay was minimal, so his boss told him he could keep some wood as part of his payment. While some might have grumbled at their lot Marks saw possibilities: the wood turned out to be old-growth redwood, he bought a jigsaw and a router and started teaching himself to make plant stands and other basic items. Before too long he was selling them at local craft fairs.

     Northern California in the ’70s was teeming with builders and back-to-the-landers, woodworkers of all descriptions teaching each other and exchanging ideas. In this supportive, “can-do” environment, Marks started to expand his basic skills. He made redwood, buckeye, olivewood, and walnut burl tables, and someone taught him how to inlay stone into the top. “I remember selling my first burl table. I told the woman nervously I wanted $100 for it, and she said, ‘Great. I'll buy it.’ I said, ‘Really? You don't have to pay that much, that's a lot of money.’ She said, ‘That's alright, I'll pay the full $100.’ I was just amazed that somebody would actually give me that much for a table that I had made.”

     He did a short stint in a cabinet shop, though sanding face frames all day quickly convinced him that he hated kitchen cabinetmaking. Another job was more to his liking: he was hired as a finisher. Although he had been doing hand-rubbed oil finishes and spraying lacquer, he was still at a beginning to intermediate level of finishing at the time of his hire. “At the end of each day I would go to the library and find any books I could on wood finishing, I'd read as much as I could, and I'd go back to work the next day and try to fake my way through it. By the end of that year I was at an advanced level of finishing—staining and dyeing, using shellac, applying pastewood fillers, spraying lacquer, rubbing out finishes. Because I had studied painting in college, I could do faux graining touch-ups when someone sanded through the veneer of a project in the shop.” Although he was learning on the job, the pay left a lot to be desired. To make ends meet, he built his own furniture in a two-car garage/shop after hours.

     During this time he met Victoria; they married in 1976, and two years later their first child was born. “I was working full-time making furniture, bringing home $500– $800 a month, which I thought was pretty good money. My wife informed me otherwise. An opportunity came up to take a job in a dental laboratory and I reluctantly took it.”

     Marks trained as a dental technician. Through his various tasks he developed fine manual dexterity, and he learned the precision of working in millimeters and thousandths of an inch. But he hated the constant stress of the work, and the idea of spending his life at a dental bench made him thoroughly depressed. He talked it out with his wife and they developed a plan. “I convinced her that I could really make a go of it with my own woodworking business, but the real key would be to have a shop on the same property as a house.”

     Marks stayed at the dental laboratory for three years, and when they did find a place to buy—a house with a horse stable full of manure on an acre of land—they were able to qualify for the loan because he had his steady job in a dental laboratory, and Victoria had steady work at a medical office. A few months after signing the papers he quit his job.

PHOTO BY KALIA KLIBAN

     The year was 1981, and it was the beginning of a great period of growth for David Marks. He got involved with the Sonoma County Woodworkers Association, a local group that had regular meetings and exhibited its work at the Sonoma County Museum. An exhibition organized by the Oakland Museum that year, featuring prominent California makers like Gary Knox Bennett and Sam Maloof, exposed Marks to a more sophisticated level of work than he had known before. That same year James Krenov moved to Fort Bragg and started teaching at the College of the Redwoods. William Zimmer and Clyde Jones both started galleries in nearby Mendocino showcasing fine woodwork.

     And there was the Baulines Crafts Guild, a Bay area group of professional craftspeople founded ten years earlier, which offered classes with Gary Bennett, Art Carpenter, and other master members. “It was like opening the floodgate; I was just getting inundated with woodworking information. Since quitting the dental technician job I had been relying on refinishing and repair work to get by, and now I was really hell-bent to just go for it with the fine woodworking. My wife wanted me to stick with the refinishing because it was consistent, stable income. But slowly I was able to make that transition.”

     As Marks’ skills and confidence grew, he entered more exhibitions and began to receive awards for his work. He won his first Best of Show award at the Sonoma County Museum in 1987. The next year he won Best of Show again, this time with a more complex table design that involved two coopered columns with an elliptical glass top.

     In 1989 he applied to the Baulines Craft Guild to become a Master Member and was accepted. “Through the Guild I also got involved with artists in other disciplines: metal workers, glass blowers, textiles, clay. All those other materials just open up your design ideas. As a woodworker, you tend to think only within the parameters of woodworking. But if you start to look at textiles, for example, at all the gradations of color and how the fabric is woven together, you take some of those influences and try to figure out how to do that in wood—that adds a whole other layer to your work.”

ALL PHOTOS BY DON RUSSEL EXCEPT AS NOTED

“Coopered Glass-Top Dining Table” (1987); Burmese padauk, Brazilian rosewood; 30″ × 74″ × 46″.

“Ancient Egyptian-Inspired Table” (1991); mahogany, gold leaf, lapus lazuli, ivory, ebony; 16″ × 71″ × 18″.

     About that same time he met an artist named Randy Johnson, who worked extensively with gold leaf and various metals and patinas. Marks was immediately excited about the techniques, and they agreed on an exchange: he would teach Johnson veneer work, and Johnson would teach him about gilding and patination in return. By the early ’90s Marks became proficient enough at it that he found himself teaching classes on gilding and patination to other woodworkers. These techniques have since become a signature part of his work.

     Musing about how chance events can change your direction, Marks recalled going to hear Wendell Castle speak at the Oakland Museum back in the ’80s. “One of the things he said that really struck me was that he didn't want to know what he was going to be doing a year from then. I thought that was curious, but I really started to understand it after a while. When you're trying to earn a living at this and you're anxious about paying the bills, you tell yourself: ‘My goal is to have a backlog of work that's going to take me through the next couple of years.’ Well, Wendell said ‘I don't want to be booked up any more than six months, because maybe eight or ten or twelve months from now I might be on a whole different path.”

     Two other chance events wove their influence on David Marks. Back in 1981, at the California Woodworking show at the Oakland Museum, Marks was particularly taken by the work of a maker named Michael Graham, who had created some unusual wall-mounted boxes that looked like bent pipes. The key to his work was the carving involved, and the potential of carving to hand-shape the work made a lasting impression. Marks had also seen another show, a King Tutankhamen exhibition that came to San Francisco around the same time. This prompted him to pick up several books on Egyptian art, and he started sketching ideas inspired by what he had seen. A “wild and crazy design” for a low table emerged.

“Paradise Ridge Winery Inlaid Bar” (1994); bubinga and various hardwoods; 2′ × 26′.

“Inlaid Dining Table” (1992); bubinga, maple; 30″ × 56″ × 56″.

     The table became a project that would go on for years, and it grew in complexity as time went on, becoming a showcase of sorts for everything he had learned. There were bent laminations and extensive carving; there were gilding and inlays; there was some challenging veneer work as well. The veneers were resawn from some rare quilted mahogany that Marks found at a local hardwood supplier in 1985; difficult to work but with figure that was extraordinary. At the time he bought as much as he could afford, and to this day wishes he could have bought more.

     The problem was that this piece was purely speculative, gobbling up time and money, and he had a mounting pile of bills to pay. By now they had a second child, adding more financial pressure. So he reluctantly put it aside and went back to work on other projects. Another reason for the long delays was the response he sometimes got from other furnituremakers when he showed them his work-in-progress. After one person whose talent he respected laughed and told Marks the piece was ridiculous, he so lost his self-confidence that he didn't work on it for months. Fortunately, most of the responses were positive and encouraging, and when he did finally finish the piece he successfully showed it in a few major exhibitions—winning another “Best of Show” award at the Sonoma County Museum in 1991—and in numerous publications. The visibility was an important boost to his career. And even more fortunately, he eventually sold the piece for enough money to recoup the 800 hours he had put into it.

     In addition to the mix of commissioned and speculative pieces he was now doing, Marks began showing at national juried craft shows, learning how to present his work and talk about it to potential buyers. Another lesson learned from the craft shows was the importance of diversity and a range of prices: “you've got to have something that sells for $500 along with that table that sells for $5000.” To accomplish that he began to show turnings along with the furniture. What he soon realized was that turnings were easier to ship to shows, didn't cost him nearly as much in time or materials, and had the potential to be a better source of income.

     As he had many times before, Marks enthusiastically sought to learn everything he could about something new. He started attending the annual turning symposiums at Brigham Young University, taking classes and soaking up information. He also took some classes locally. He says candidly: “I think one of the things that happens to people is they get to a certain point in their career and say, ‘I'm too important to take a class with somebody else. If I take a class with somebody else then that means I don't know everything.’ Well, I already know that I don't know everything. And I also consider myself to be a lifelong student.”

“Inlaid Dining Table” (1994); quilted maple, ebony, wenge; 31″ × 72″-108″ × 48″.

“Buffet” (1994); quilted maple, ebony, wenge, Eastern maple; 20″ × 72″ × 36″.

     He had an idea for a piece: a large wall sculpture, a turned disc almost four feet in diameter, that would be gilded and patinated. His wife worried about yet more speculative work, but unlike the Egyptian table, he made the wall sculpture relatively quickly and sold it almost as quickly for $5000. By the late ’90s he was focussed almost exclusively on this new direction in his work.

     Besides making things, Marks was also teaching. He still gave occasional gilding and patination classes in his shop. Also, a friend had started a business selling gold leaf supplies, and he hired Marks to demonstrate these products at trade shows around the country. And finally, the Baulines Craft Guild had a program through which an apprentice would pay a Master Member to study with him or her, and David took on apprentices on a regular basis. He says: “I love woodworking, and I love sharing it with other people. I've been fortunate to have learned from some great teachers, and I just feel obligated to pass on whatever has been shared with me.”

     At this point his work was represented by del Mano Gallery in Los Angeles, and they gave him a “featured artist” exhibit and took one of his major pieces to the 2000 SOFA (Sculptural Objects & Functional Art) Show in Chicago. “Being at SOFA was very exciting. I really got my hopes up, because one couple was very interested in one of the big pieces I had there. Del Mano had the sculpture priced at $20,000…and this couple still wanted it. Well, we went out to their home to measure the space where they wanted it to go…and it turned out to be 4″ too big to fit over their mantel. One thing led to another, and the whole deal fell through.” It was a major let-down, and Marks flew back to California feeling depressed.

     When he got home, his wife told him about an odd phone message. “I'm pretty sure it was one of your woodworking buddies playing a joke on you,” she said. “I almost erased it, but I know you've told me never to erase your messages so I left it on the machine.” “Well, what was it?” Marks wanted to know. “Oh,” she said with a laugh, “someone wanted to know if you would like to host a TV show.”

     It was in fact a producer who had called; her production company was doing a national search for a host for a new cable show to be launched along the lines of the wildly successful New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram. Marks was one of several hundred nation-wide who they were contacting; if he was interested he had to submit slides of his work and take an on-camera test. At the time Marks had what he describes as “a generally scruffy look” but he did the screen test anyway. Time passed, he heard nothing, and forgot about it.

     Three months later, the producer called to tell him he was a finalist. “But,” she said, “we can't go any further unless you get a haircut. This is the Home & Garden Channel. They're pretty conservative, and they've got a look they're going for.” “Well, I'll tell you right now,” Marks replied, “I'm not putting on a baseball cap, and I'm not wearing suspenders and a plaid shirt.” But he got the haircut…and he eventually got the job.What clinched the deal was that Marks had a large, well-photographed portfolio of widely varied work, perfect for a program that would present lots of styles and techniques. And most importantly, the years of speaking and demonstrating at shows had given Marks a good deal of poise in front of an audience.

     What followed was a protracted struggle negotiating all the details. The initial budget was unrealistically small; they increased it, though never quite enough. When they discovered that Marks had a comfortable, well-lit shop, they agreed to film there instead of making him fly to a location in Knoxville, Tennessee. The money they offered wasn't great, and they flatly refused to give him any royalties, but he got the rights for everything he designed for the show. And, he reasoned to himself, HGTV then had a viewership of over 75 million households, more visibility than a woodworker could even dream of. The nagging problem was that after months of negotiations Marks still didn't have a signed contract, even though he had hired a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer right from the start. The legal fees were adding up, which only increased his stress.

PHOTO BY HAP SAKWA

“Scarab Chair” [and detail] (1991); wenge, maple, fossilized walrus tusk ivory; 37½ × 24″ × 24″.

“Third Stone From the Sun” (1993); European olivewood, ebon-x, gold and silver leaf; 39″ × 18″ × 1″.

“Sitting Bench” (1999); cast bronze with patina; 21″ × 26″ × 11″.

     The producers were eager to set a date to start shooting a pilot. Marks told them that he needed three months to prepare. They assured him that it would only be a test run. A closer date was set. Still no contract. As the date approached, Marks stayed up late into the night, for many nights—he still had a full load of commissioned work to do during the day—building a small table for them to shoot. Eventually the day arrived. Ten people—producers, executives, cameramen and sound techs—all showed up at his shop, ready to go. And he still had no contract. The producers gave him an ultimatum: Either they shoot right then, or the deal was off. Marks just looked at them, took a deep breath, and said to himself, “Alright, I'm going to go for it.”

     That pilot went well, and everything took off from there at a furious pace. As Marks explains: “When they show up to shoot, they've got two days to capture everything on videotape. They have no time to wait for the glue to set or finish to dry. You're allowed 15 minutes between each scene to do whatever you've got to do—reset the tablesaw, position something for the next shot, memorize your lines. We had to strip everything down to the bare essentials, make things as minimalistic as possible, and have them prepared in advance in as many steps as possible. They gave me a very small budget, and I had to pay lots of subs good money—often more money than I was making—to keep everybody on a tight deadline.”

     In addition to long days of shooting—there were sometimes as many as 20 takes for a single shot—there were days of doing voice-overs, meeting with producers, writing and memorizing scripts, designing projects, overseeing the work of subcontractors, making sure the shop was stocked with sharp tools and whatever materials might be needed for a scene. Marks was working 75-80 hours a week; it was, as he puts it, “a rapid plunge into insanity.” After seven or eight episodes he finally got a signed contract.

	ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD BY HAP SAKWA

“Harlequin Vessel” (2003); maple, silver, copper and gold leaf with chemical patina; H: 10½″ × D: 5″.

“Ostrich Egg” (1999); genuine ostrich egg, silver, copper and gold leaf with chemical patina.

“Trilobyte” (2000); flame maple, poplar, silver leaf and copper with chemical patina, 37″ × 54″ × 8″.

“Alchemist's Disk #2” (1996); gold leaf, ancient shark's tooth, patina on silver leaf and copper, D: 45″ × 5″.

     But then there was a new rub: they decided not to air the show on the Home & Garden Channel after all. Instead, it would be on the newer and relatively unknown Do It Yourself Network. The other consequence was that all of his own work went on a very long “hold.”

     It eventually got better. By the time they had done 20 or 30 shows Marks was feeling more experienced and comfortable. And while the studio wanted control over how he looked and dressed, when it came to the projects they gave him free rein. He also got to keep all the furniture that he built on the show. He ultimately did 91 episodes, shot during a three year period. They began airing in 2002 and have been rerun endlessly since then. The show also has been syndicated in Australia on the How To Network and appears on the Internet via www.diynetwork.com.

     The visibility has indeed been a big boon to his career. This has been especially true for his teaching; as he points out, “I'm not on the network that is being watched by architects and designers, I'm on the network whose audience is the do-it-yourselfer. We started getting inundated with emails from people saying, ‘Love your show. Is there any way I can take a class with you?’ So I started setting up one-on-one classes here at the shop.”

     Then, in 2004, he and Victoria decided to start their own school. “When we began to set up some group classes, it became apparent that I really needed to make the space bigger. So around 2005 I built an addition to the shop. It's now 2,200 square feet. We're wheelchair accessible. We've got a bathroom there. We've got the woodshed. Everything's well lit. We've got an automated vacuum system hooked up to the various machines. And I've bought a lot more machines and hand tools to accommodate a number of different classes.”

     Now, in 2008, things have developed into a pattern: two weeks of teaching each month, either at his shop or on the road, and two weeks developing designs and making new pieces. Marks couldn't be more pleased…or more surprised.

     “What's amazing to me is that you can really create your own vision if you keep putting it out there. I mean, all my classes are completely booked until early 2009. I've built a small gallery by the shop because some of the students who come here for classes have expressed a desire to purchase some of my work, and I've already sold a number of pieces through that. I've got sales at other galleries and commissioned work as well.

     “It's been a long time since I was making burl tables and thinking, ‘Wow, $100. Do you really want to spend $100?’ I guess that's how it goes. You pay your dues, pay your dues, pay your dues. And then, all of a sudden, you're an overnight success…35 years later.”