By Carol Fisher-Linn
You know how you sometimes fall into doing things you never thought about doing? Some people are totally intentional about what they do for an occupation, working toward it from the time they could dream about it. I want to be a lawyer. I want to be a nurse. I want to be an orthodontist. They dream it, and they do it.
Then, there are others who literally fall into what they now do as adults, something that is the total opposite of what they started out doing. When you talk to people you know, or read the biographies of well-known individuals, you discover that many started in totally different directions until an event took place that changed their trajectory; such was the case of Richard Crowe, whose beautiful work you see accompanying this article.
Richard is a federal employee who works as a Construction Analyst for the Small Business Bureau (he gets called in by the government when disasters hit, and property damage has to be evaluated and assessed all over the U.S.). He is also a fine woodworker who creates everything from gorgeous federal period furniture with turned cabriole legs (his absolute favorite legs to make) to gorgeous lathe-turned pieces from exotic woods and any tree burls he finds that he is allowed to remove.
Born in Western New York, schooled at Canisius and then off to college run by more Jesuits in Philadelphia, he settled into life in Pennsylvania after college, partnering in a circa 1720 pre-civil war hotel building which eventually got turned into a restaurant/bar (1976), The Derby Wheel Pump Inn in Erdenheim, PA. Obviously, due to its age and its status as an historical landmark, the building needed major renovation, including dropping steel beams down from the third floor to give the building much needed support. He and his partners ran the bar successfully for years until they sold it in 1991, but he needed something to do with all the tools he acquired while doing the renovation of the building. He joined a few elite woodworker clubs in the area and got into the fine art of wood working and turning. Entering his work in multi-media art shows, he ended up getting odd commissions to do things like renovating antique two-inch mahogany doors with stained glass for a patron, doing a tribute piece to the goddess Isis for the Embassy of Cairo (yes, Egypt, i.e. the desert), and fashioning seven-inch turned wooden black locust balls for the Newell post tops on the Anheuser-Busch bridge where the magnificent Clydesdale horses get paraded every morning.
Being a Western New York native, he eventually decided to come back home. Having skied at Holiday Valley and, of course, loving the area, he lived in the village of Ellicottville for a while and then found the property he now lives on off Hencoop Road. As many say about Ellicottville, he declared, “I settled in and just never moved.”
A visit to his shop was exciting for a wanna-be wood-turner like me. He had on his lathe, a vase he was turning from a burl. Around the corner in the shop, I came across knee high burls the size of tables, waiting for his creative mastery. As for furniture, he works by eye, instinct and/or photos rather than from purchased patterns. From photos, he created a unique bed called a ZEN bed which gives the appearance of floating because the footboard does not touch the floor. The headboard tilts back (so much more comfortable for reading or having morning coffee). His home is filled with his masterworks, along with a few oddities that found their way as decorations on his walls for lack of knowing what else to do with them.
His furniture is incredible, but his wooden turned bowls and tsatskes caught my eye. Imagine a wiffle ball turned from cherry wood, or a lovely intricate covered bowl perfect for a ladies’ vanity to catch her earrings. One of his intricate bowl pieces was made of over 1100 tiny pieces glued together and then worked on the wood lathe. These are called polychromatic wood turnings.
Crowe also does utilitarian work. Think spindles, staircase repair work, bowls, vessels, and architectural wood turnings. He showed us a bag filled with stair railing pieces from a vintage home, which can no longer be replaced commercially. He recreated the fractured spindles and will reconstruct the railings for the client when the pieces are completed. He does the same with pieces missing from antique wooden picture frames. He is simply a master of a lost art. Crowe can be reached through his email at richardcrowe72@gmail.com or phone 716-316-4423. He is located at 7379 Watson Road in Ellicottville.