We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Forrest Hudes a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Forrest , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

Early into starting in woodworking I began a job as a bartender at a new hotel opening in Los Angeles. The general manager of the hotel told the whole staff during training one day how much he valued us and our unique talents and wanted us to share what we had to offer with the hotel. So at the end of the day I went up to him and told him I was an artist and woodworker and if they needed anything for the hotel I would love to make it. He was very nice about it and asked me to email him my portfolio, which I did and he sent a kind e-mail back and that was that. A few weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything from him about it so I reached out again and asked if he thought there were any opportunities for me to make something for the hotel and he said not at the time but he would keep it in mind. Another couple of weeks went by and feeling much friskier than I normally am I decided to just make something and show it to him, so I made a sculptural wall hanging version of the bar logo out of wood, finished it, and photographed it and sent it to him saying how much fun it was to make and if he saw a place for it in the bar I would love to sell it to the hotel. It felt to me like a big kind of crazy swing to make without being asked, but he forward it to the owners of the bar and they loved it, bought it, and ended up commissioning me to make a whole lot of other art and shelving and other objects for the bars and restaurant in the hotel.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My background is in woodworking. I grew up working with my carpenter father in Pennsylvania, where a love of sawdust and tools got embedded in me. I have degrees in both Theater and 3D Design, but I primarily think of myself as a craftsperson and artist. I have done a lot of design/build work, interior construction work, carpentry, and furniture making, but these days I mostly make one of a kind sculptural furniture out of solid wood. My work in wood is focused on exploring and exploding the rationalist, macho, rigid history of American wood craft. I like to subvert the expectations of woodworking by softening, rounding, dripping, and smudging any straight lines or flat surfaces. I elicit a softer, more fluid side of wood as a material. I believe that the assumptions and norms of wood run deep in our cultural consciousness and that by doing something unexpected with wood I can help to challenge those norms.
Within my work I seek to bring together the qualities of softness and strength, skill and freedom, and fluidity and rigidity.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

There is a small but powerful book(let) by Jennifer Armbrust called Proposals for the Feminine Economy that has been very meaningful to me. I encourage anyone to read it, wether you are an individual artist or running a large team. For me, especially as an individual trying to make a creative career happen one piece at a time, it has served as a useful reminder that there is no destination to wait to get to before implementing my best way of doing things. Sometimes it can feel like “Oh, once I am this successful or making this much work or money then I can focus on the way I do it”, but really, right now today is the way you run your creative practice and life, and it is the exact right time to do so with your best principles in practice.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

An important lesson I grew up with was “If you can’t do it right don’t do it at all.” It’s a terrible lesson. Internalizing that prevents risk taking, growth, and the deep powerful lessons of failure. It is still an internal struggle for me, against perfectionism and self-limiting belief. It is hard to mess up, and uncomfortable to do a bad job. But these are also the best teachers. I think now I try to live with the lesson “If you can’t do it right, do it until you can.”

Contact Info:

• Website: www.forresthudes.com
• Instagram: @forresthudes

Image Credits
Christian Gerard