Louis Fry -- miscellaneous info -- for the craftsman

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I warned you that you might find anything on this page. Here is an excerpt from a Texas Monthly article that has some kind words about the work I do.

Tucked among the cedars and scruffy oaks outside Henly, Louis Fry's unassuming woodworking shop is like an oyster, rough and functional on the outside but capable of producing luminous jewels. Drop in a few pieces of cocobolo or curly maple, and four weeks to four months later, out comes a pearl in the shape of, say, a massive desk with piston-fit drawers and hand-carved dovetail joinery or a dining table whose finely carved curved legs, called cabrioles; reflect the client's love of seashells and wildflowers.

Of course, it's the man inside the shop, 49-year-old Louis Fry, who is responsible for such amazing transformations. Fry says he knew he "wanted to create things" after attending his first crafts fair, in San Francisco in the early seventies. So he bought a little house in South Austin with a detached garage, the cheapest Sears table saw, a drill, and a router. "I'd stay up until two o'clock in the morning, making noise and learning from books like the Sunset manual on making bookcases and hobbyhorses," he says. Providentially, his initial commissions never seemed to exceed his abilities -- and now, after 21 years of concentrated self-instruction, nothing seems beyond them. Fry, though, is self-effacing. "For me, this is a very humbling occupation," he says. "Every time I think I have something mastered, it comes around and kicks me in the butt."

Photo after photo in his fat portfolio attests to his mastery of styles, including contemporary, deco, modernist, and classical, rendered in an alphabet soup of woods -- bubinga, cocobolo, curly maple, mesquite, pecan. And if the devil is in the details, his work is possessed. Consider the legs on a curved-front walnut china cabinet Fry calls "one of my most ambitious pieces." Each shapely turned leg is inlaid with eight strips of wenge, a chocolate-colored wood with a black grain, that protrude slightly. He had to rout the grooves, cut the strips to the exact length of the grooves, then round the ends of each strip to tolerances that would make a NASA engineer swoon. Ponder the elliptical cutouts in the cabinet's cornice, fitted with slices of moss agate, and it's wavy wenge inlay, and you begin to wonder if his brain looks entirely different from everybody else's. "Very tedious, Fry says proudly of the four-month project."

The above was excerpted from an excellent article about 12 Texas artisans called The Handmades' Tale published in the July 1998 issue of Texas Monthly magazine. It was written by Suzy Banks, and the photography was done by James McGoon Photography. These artists reserve copyright.

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