Woodworker Creates Peace Altar
San Francisco Chronicle
December 31, 1986
By Patricia Leigh Brown
This article contaians 654 words.
Something
tangible for the
peace movement
The idea of creating an Altar for Peace from a 125-foot English walnut tree came to the woodworker George Nakashima in a dream.
"There has appeared an extraordinary natural phenomenon, something that occurs only once in a life time or perhaps once in the history of a nation or in all time," the 81-year-old Nakashima wrote to his friends, three years ago, after the dream, "lt is a great walnut tree. It is a tree that should be a symbiosis of nature and man in the deepest spiritual sense. It is now on hand."
Although Nakashima had spent a lifetime "listening to the cries of wood," creating furniture that seems to unlock the hidden souls of trees, he had never encountered a piece of timber such as the one that began life as a sapling two or three hundred years ago on a Long Island estate.
"I felt the peace movement needed something tangible, a sort of symbol, something you can put your hands on" Nakashima said recently, clad in leather moccasins and a hanten, the traditional Japanese wrap coat. "lt was a great tree. Trees with this character should have a special meaning and special use."
Something tangible for the peace movement
Today, the great tree—the one that took a whole week to cut down, the one so massive that there was only one type of saw powerful enough to hew boards from it—will be dedicated and installed in its new incarnation at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Manhattan at the fourth annual Concert for Peace, to be conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
The altar, which weighs three-quarters of a ton, was transported to the cathedral on a 40-foot flatbed truck. It was built at the Japanese compound in Bucks County, Pa., that Nakashima built himself, a serene village-like place where the only disturbances seem to be deer dining on the bok choy in Nakashima's vegetable garden.
The quiet refuge reflects its maker. A self-described "Hindu Catholic," Nakashima was born in Seattle to Japanese parents.
He earned an architectural degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then spent seven years traveling around the world—to Paris, Tokyo and, finally, to a Hindu ashram in Pondicherry, in southern India, "I had more to learn than I had to give," he explained, "so I gave up my salary to become a monk."
There, he studied with the spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo, a relationship that was to have a lasting impact Unlike many modern furniture makers, whose aesthetic judgments are often molded by the marketplace, Nakashima's designs are based on a belief in "the relationship between material things—nature—and the human spirit"
A reverence for nature pervades Nakashima's work. Much of the drama of his designs comes from a willingness to accept and exploit a tree's knots, gnarls and other deformities that nature might yield.
Known widely for his construction methods, Nakashima combines mechanized cutting and planing with elegant, handmade details. In the Altar for Peace, which resembles a gigantic table, delicate rosewood butterfly inlays are used to span natural crags between two 3-inch-thick walnut surfaces cut from the same log. The edges of the altar are ripply and follow the natural shape of the tree trunk.
The altar has been paid for largely by Nakashima, who estimates that he has spent around $10,000 on the project. Six months ago, a fund-raising committee was formed by a band of Nakashima admirers to further Nakashima's goal and to provide funds for maintenance.
Although Nakashima has designed distinctive works of architecture, such as the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Albuquerque, N.M., most of his life has been devoted to furniture, an activity perfected under traumatic circumstances during the 1940s, when Nakashima and his family were sent to a Japanese internment camp in Idaho.
After their release, the Nakashimas settled in Bucks County, where Nakashima has been pursuing his craft ever since.
Overview
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1984 to 1989
Although Nakashima had spent a lifetime "listening to the cries of wood," creating furniture that seems to unlock the hidden souls of trees, he had never encountered a piece of timber such as the one that began life as a sapling two or three hundred years ago on a Long Island estate.
"I felt the peace movement needed something tangible, a sort of symbol, something you can put your hands on" Nakashima said recently, clad in leather moccasins and a hanten, the traditional Japanese wrap coat. "lt was a great tree. Trees with this character should have a special meaning and special use."
