RICHARD WEIGAND’S BLOG

“In certain pieces there are ‘hard’ lines that are intentional and that’s okay. But a hard line that is not intended to be hard, that’s a problem for both the maker and his customer, and it’s difficult to explain though it’s easily sensed."

“On furniture, you want to fair any curve. Even if it’s a small curve, you put your hand on it and follow it up and down and you can tell if it’s faired. It feels continuous; there’s nothing abrupt."

Richard Weigand says that to fair the curves in his woodworking projects, he looks at the shadows. “Light shows the hard line. If you have a hard shadow, the curve is not properly faired. If it’s properly faired you don’t have black and white, you have a gradient...

But if a curve – as often seen in nature and in art — is free-form, changing over its distance, being wide and open here and tighter and more controlled there, yet is still active, graceful, and so appealing that it draws the mind and hand of observers to touch it,...

If all the points in a curve are the same distance from a center point then it’s called an arc and it can be measured and easily replicated. If the points on a curve change over its distance but do so in a regular pattern and the pattern is repeated at each end, it’s...

Fairing a curve means adjusting the shape of a not-straight line so that it is both useful to its function and pleasing to the eye of the viewer. Some curves are “tight” like interrupted circles and seem to hum a high-pitched, tense tone; others are large and loose...

“Fairing a curve” is a term that comes from boatbuilding — a very specialized subset of woodworking in which joinery, science, function, and design play important roles but also in which art is of primary consideration. A boat that is beautiful is also a boat that...