A few years ago, a couple friends came by for a visit and wanted to photograph me in my shop and doing some stuff with my horses. I had a three year old that had just been started by my friend Mike Seal at the time, so we went out and caught him up. Art […]

Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman studies how we gather information and make decisions based on this information. He observes that we tend to harvest low hanging fruit…the information that is within easy reach. We then attach ourselves to this information and build our world around it, rarely questioning further. Craftsmen are no different. We […]

I’m reading this new book by Matthew Crawford. He makes the case for managing our ‘highly engineered culture’ and our ‘mental fragmentation’ what with the constant stream of information we have nowadays. This kind of material is always intriguing to me because of its relevance to craftsmanship and artistry. Early in the book he mentions […]

Folks who work with their hands will often donate blood to the project they are working on. Farmers, ranchers, craftsmen, carpenters…all have this in common. The left hand of a right handed craftsman takes a lot of abuse, and occasionally the right hand gets in the way of danger as well. I chuckle when I […]

So it’s TCAA time in the saddle shop these days. Every year I promise that I’ll get started sooner on my projects, but life seems to have a way of co-opting my plans. Our deadline for having our pieces at the museum is early August and I’ve got a running start on a saddle, but […]

Thoughts return to that day in 1944 when President Eisenhower and his planners decided to pull the trigger on the largest military invasion in the history of the world. In order to crack Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’, it was decided that the US would release large gliders that would silently penetrate into the French interior at […]

This aphorism is attributed to Hippocrates, a physician who was born about 460 BC. There is much to unpack from this series of two word statements. “Life is short” Who can argue? Certainly no one under fifty years of age! “Art long” The study and mastery of art or craftsmanship is a journey that will […]

Art and function seem to be at odds with one another. At least in our culture. “If it’s purty, that means it ain’t usable.” “If it’s usable, there is a limit to how purty you can make it.” “Pretty is as pretty does.” I could list many more platitudes that try to separate function and […]

This is a saddle I made not long ago for a fellow from Texas. This is the third saddle of mine he has owned (he bought one used, and the other two were custom made). Some years ago, I did the numbers and found that half my saddle orders were for repeat customers. Within the […]

I was trolling through some photos recently and ran across this case that I made a couple years ago for a rancher. This design was worked out to serve the needs of an every-day cowboy and conscientious horseman. He needed something for calving that was secure, accessible on the nearside, and could be taken off […]