Greenwoodworking with Charles Thompson

Artist Charles Thompson carved the crest on his Snake Chair from an apple tree found at a nearby orchard.

The Two-Slat Ladderback/Jeff Chair was inspred by chair-maker Jeff Lefkowitz’s designs.

Juicebox Wine Bar in Shelburne Falls, Mass., commissioned the Little Moon Bench.

Thompson created the Windsor Bassinet just before his son, now age two, was born.

Thompson based the Brettstuhl’s chairback carvings on motifs found in early Connecticut River Valley furniture.

These three-legged stools were made from felled branches of riven oak, cherry crotch, and pine. A

Artist Charles Thompson.

From an apartment in Brooklyn, Charles Thompson labored over his thesis as he worked toward earning his MFA in writing. To give his brain a break, he picked up woodworking—a sort of tactile meditation, as he describes it—and found immense satisfaction in ending his day with an actual product rather than a series of notes and drafts. That was in 2015. Fast-forward to 2019, when Thompson made his first chair utilizing greenwoodworking, a method where the artisan turns a freshly felled tree into an object. The experience resonated so deeply that Thompson knew there was no going back to the written word.

The Nashua, New Hampshire, native traded in city living for a property in Western Massachusetts with a barn that serves as his studio. Gravitating toward wood he harvests near his home—think apple, ash, oak, and pine—Thompson makes chairs, benches, and stools, some that boast relief carvings traditional to the Connecticut River Valley. He calls his style folk or preindustrial, but he’s a proponent of exploring different methods and aesthetics, too.

That’s where teaching comes in. “It’s the most fun thing I can imagine doing,” he says, which is good given the number of public workshops he’s teaching this year (catch him in May at Boston’s North Bennet Street School). “When you’re with a group of people who are more enthusiastic about something than the rest of the world, there’s this amazing energy. The creative process becomes shared, and before you know it, you’re building something more than a chair.”

The Society of Arts + Crafts awarded Thompson its Mineck Fellowship in Furniture Arts, which included a $25,000 prize, at the end of 2024. Thompson plans to use the money to improve his studio and expand his classes: “Woodworking is the container for everything; now it’s the rhythm of my life.” charlesthompson.net