“At best a reproduction is only a substitute for the original, an imitation. However, if the craftsmanship is skillful and the craftsman in tune with the Shaker spirit, there is beauty and great satisfaction in the result. He is projecting into the present the inspiration of the past.”
–from “Religion in Wood, A Book of Shaker Furniture” by Edward Deming Andrew and Faith Andrew
Marty Travis’ Fairbury, Ill., vintage farmhouse is filled with minimalist furniture–the very cutting edge of 21st Century design, one would think. Except that his furnishings are not trendy London imports but copies of Shaker pieces originally created at least 100 years ago.
Travis, a craftsman who specializes in reproductions of Shaker furniture and accessories, points out how far ahead of their time members of this religious sect, founded in 1784, were. “The Shakers were already there in minimalism,” he says.
Travis will bring his exhibit “Traviswood,” featuring his tables, chests, chairs, oval stacking boxes and seed boxes, to the 17th Annual Spring Country Folk Art Fair at the Kane County Fairgrounds in St. Charles Friday through March 22.
Travis believes that one of the reasons for the current revival of interest in things Shaker may be people’s “longing for something simple and tactile in this very hectic time.”
His work qualifies in those ways and more.
In his unpainted pieces, he plays up the beauty of the wood the way a jeweler would a rare stone. The bird’s-eye maple top and apron of a side table gleam with a golden sheen, the scattered brunette curls in the grain as intriguing as the coat of a wild cat. Travis marries that flamboyant wood with sturdy legs in plain blond curly maple, then punctuates this fugue of finishes with a knob of dark red cherry.
He tries to imagine how the Shakers “would have done it and how that piece would look today. That is part of the challenge, to create the wear. To make it look right, you have to study a lot of pieces,” says Travis, who regularly visits museums and private collections.
Michael Volmar, curator of Fruitlands Museums in Harvard, Mass., which will carry an exhibit of Travis’ seed boxes from May to October, calls Travis “probably the finest contemporary craftsman of Shaker materials we know.”
Travis started working in wood while in high school, making kitchen cabinets. He opened his own shop in 1979. One Sunday in 1985 while he was in church, the shop burnt to the ground. Mice had gotten into the wiring.
The fire “was a big moment,” Travis says. “It pushed me to realize I was going to have to get real serious about my work.”
Most of the wood he uses is harvested from cherry, maple and walnut trees grown on the farmland where his family originally settled in 1830. (In the last 20 years he has planted 30,000 trees, reforesting his family’s and several adjacent farms.)
Some furniture pieces, as well as his oval stacking boxes, are painted in “colors that are very true,” says Sharon Koomler, curator of Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass.
There’s the lemon yellow of a handled carrier, the bird’s-egg blue of a blanket chest, the dark, apple red of an oval box–antique colors seldom seen today.
Although Travis is known for overall excellence in his craft, he gets special recognition for his reproductions of seed boxes, duplicates of those the Shakers packed with envelopes of seed, delivered to general stores and left on consignment.
“Many craftsmen just look at something and reproduce it,” says local collector Judy McCaskey. Travis “seems to understand the Shaker spirit–their idea that an angel might come and sit upon the chair they made.”
McCaskey’s husband, Ray, president and chief executive office of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, has furnished the new executive offices of the corporate headquarters at 300 E. Randolph St. with Travis’ reproductions, as well as furniture by other artisans.
Many serious collectors like the McCaskeys mix originals with reproductions in their collections.
The Shakers made only chairs and stools for what they called “the world” and the rest was for their own use, says Bloomington collector Don Raycraft. “Much of it is in museums, or a private collector has it.”
Scarcity of originals is the same reason why museums such as Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, N.H., not only sell his work in their gift shops but also exhibit it.
Travis’ seed boxes sell for $125 each; chairs with herringbone weave pattern sell for $300; stools are $58, children’s rockers, $300; a harvest table, $3,000; a sewing table, $775; a side table, $1,000; oval stacking boxes, $30 to $300.
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For information on buying Travis creations, call 815-692-3336, or write R.R. 1, Box 96, Fairbury, Ill. 61739.
