D’Arcy Guitars was founded by accident when tough times called for a shift in lifestyle. At the beginning of 2020 when the world largely shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and my career as an art historian was put on temporary hiatus, I turned back to my first love: carpentry.

I was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, where carpentry is an easy trade to fall into. I was introduced to fine joinery at the age of 12 when, while the rest of my high school shop class learned how to build simple pine chairs, I drew up my own plans for a 6-foot solid mahogany armoire. Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood I worked as a carpenter framing and roofing houses, and did construction ranging from swimming pools to high-rise buildings. In 2012, with more artistic ambitions I enrolled in a BFA program and channeled my love for making things into the art world, making sculptures and paintings.

After earning my degree I moved to New York where I found work building picture frames for the artists and museums I had studied in school. My frames can be seen hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, among other such institutions. But while building has always been as much a necessity for me as a passion, my questions about art ran deeper, and I enrolled in graduate studies in art history and philosophy. The biggest questions in my mind are: what makes an object a work of art, and why?

At the beginning of 2020, when the art world ground to a halt, I returned to Vancouver to “wait out the pandemic,” and, when a friend lent me his lathe I began turning baseball bats (to cope with the loss of that year’s baseball season). Soon my art-world peers began telling me these bats were “works of art!" But no, I thought, they were just baseball bats.

My twin brother, acclaimed Canadian jazz musician David Blake, asked me around that time if I would build him an archtop guitar, and together, the two of us designed the Figure Zero, what is now my flagship model. I had already made a handful of solid-body electric guitars over the years. But the unique combination of painstaking attention to detail, aesthetic refinement, and the hands-on mastery required to produce a superior-sounding and playing acoustic instrument immediately became an obsession.

Since 2021 I have been working at Sadowsky Guitars in New York, where I specialize in the neck preparation and fretwork of Sadowsky’s NYC basses and guitars, and setting up Sadowsky archtops. I have done maintenance for such acclaimed musicians as Steve Miller, Russell Malone, Chico Pinheiro, Tal Yahalom, Frank Vignola, Jimmy Bruno, David Blake, Luis Salcedo and more.

The aesthetic and tonal choices made in each D’Arcy instrument are made with love and joy, and always with the burning question in the back of my mind: this is not a work of art — or is it?