June 7th 2007
As our reputation has grown and with a steadily increasing number of commissions, it has become imperative that I clarify for our clients the nature of what we are trying to do and the ways in which our commitments to absolute excellence will affect them.
It is our stated studio policy that we attend to our work on a first-come-first-served basis: Once a deposit is received a job is begun with the intent of completing the work in a timely fashion. However, what may not be understood clearly is what we necessarily mean by “in a timely fashion”.
There are two of us in the shop: myself as the sole carver, and my lovely wife Marilyn, who does much of the detail and finish sanding operations. Together, we are committed to giving each of our clients our very best work...period. I am able to carve “at the top of my game” for between five and six hours in a day, and generally not more than 5 or, with unhelpful stress, 6 days in a week: Beyond this I begin to lose the intense level of concentration my work requires and my eye-mind-hand coordination begins to get sloppy.
In short, I begin to make mistakes, some of which can be corrected, some of which cannot: These last can jeopardize an entire project, especially toward the final stages of detail carving. There are days which, practically upon rising from bed, I know that if I touch a piece of wood I will ruin it: On those days I do not try to carve. There are days when I cannot hold the image of my finished sculpture in my mind clearly enough to allow me to trust myself to remove wood in order to get to that end result: On those days as well, I find something else to do. Lastly, I am a migraine sufferer, and while I have these headaches under some degree of control, if one manifests itself, neither I nor you want me to work on your project.
For these reasons, I want each of you, EACH of whom we regard as our single most respected client, to understand why I may tell you that a project is taking longer than I originally estimated, and also to understand why I ask you to not commission work at the last minute and then press upon me to get things done in your time frame. What we do cannot be accomplished all that much more quickly now than it could five hundred years ago.
Along these same lines of thinking, I have had on occasion the problem of having a commission drag out from the client end, for any of a plethora of reasons. For example, it has taken a substantial amount of time from the time the project has been started to the approval of a final design...In several cases, as much as a year. Yet when the project parameters were at long last finalized, I was pressured to get the work done in the originally proposed time frame. This, increasingly, isn’t working out. When this kind of situation arises I have to put other work on the bench to keep my studio viable, and this means that a delayed project gets moved toward the back of the line and again must wait its turn. The only way to avoid this kind of problem is to move decisively at each stage of a project from the beginning.
Thank you for your understanding with these issues.
God Bless,
R. Stephan & Marilyn Toman
