My piece Totem#2 will be up for auction on custommade.com. Custom made a website of custom furniture makers offers an excellent resource for finding unique furniture on the web. I will post a link to the auction on the blog with more details when the auction goes live. For now though, I would to share some of the story behind the piece. Totem#2 was built in 1999 as an entry into the Furniture Society’s juried exhibition “The Circle Unbroken.” Accepted as one of 30 pieces juried into the show, it was exhibited at the Appalachian Center for Crafts in 1999 and at the Huntsville Museum of Art in 2000. Since then the piece has been shown in numerous venues -most notably the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA. As the name of the piece alludes, Totem #2 was the second in series of cabinets whose inspiration was derived from images of African tribal initiation dance shields I found in the course of exploring my interest in African art. The other pieces in that body of work - Totem #1,Totem #3, Red & Yellow #1, and Big Ears, which can be viewed on my website - all exhibit a similar exploration of color, texture and geometric pattern. The shape of the door in Totem#2 was directly inspired from my research into shapes of the shields as was the idea for the carved out shape for the door handle. Which in the shields represented a place for the dancers to slide the shield over their arm. This piece also represents a bridge to my more figurative work, which came after the totem series. The figurative aspect developed by accident as I was playing around with the geometric shapes on the side of the cabinet. The shapes began to take the form of arms and the overall stature of the cabinet began to take on that of a figure with his hand on his hips.
The function of this piece is listed as CD cabinet as the shelves are spaced to accommodate CD’s, however the shelves can be removed to accommodate larger objects.
Totem #2 CD Cabinet 32”W x 78”H x 9”D constructed from walnut, ash and maple woods with painted details
I recently completed a project for a small town near me to make a couple of outdoor benches. Nothing complicated, just big chunky sturdily built benches made from cedar I bought from a local mill and put together to last many years in the wind and rain. The whole process of doing this project got me to thinking about those trendy words flying around these days, green and sustainable, and how they apply to me as a builder.
There are lots of new materials and recycled products out on the market to work with now, many of which claim to be green and sustainable and many of which visually are quite exciting. Bamboo and all of the different ways they have been able to manufacture it, is cool stuff and I would love to use it in a piece someday, as well as recycled beams from an old factory or plywood made from wheat. But alas all of the above are expensive and I have as yet been unable to convince a client to use them in a piece of furniture. So because of this am I not a green maker. Am I part of the problem and not the solution?
My little bench project helped me to gain some perspective on that matter. Here I was building something for a local town out of locally sourced materials built to last decades and most of the money stayed within my local community. All in all I would say that should score pretty high on the green and sustainability scale, so should I now pat myself on the back and call myself green worthy? The answer is unfortunately more complicated than that. Not all of my work meets the standards set by the bench project. In fact most does not. But it has caused me to think and compelled me to come up with a useful definition of “green” that I can work with.
For me the best definition is a personal one that reads more like a laundry list than a written in stone definition. I try and use local wood whenever possible. Short of that I try to use mostly eastern hardwoods. I stay away from exotic materials unless the client demands it and then I put on an environment surcharge which gets donated to a fund for forest stewardship. I try to use less toxic water-based finishes and non-toxic milk-based paints. As I learn more, I expect will add more to my laundry list. But in the end, the bottom line for me is building work that is of the highest quality construction designed to last for lifetimes.
When I sold my very first piece of furniture, my clients proclaimed that it would be in their family for generations. That is a powerful statement of sustainability in a disposable society where things are destined for the landfill almost from inception. While not as sexy as using recycled wood or bamboo or recycled plastic bottles, building furniture to last generations is my main contribution to helping create a better environment. I am still reluctant to pat myself on the back and call myself a green maker - there is still plenty more I could do for mother nature - but I am part of the solution.
In this post I have excerpted a couple of segments from my interview with Molly Matlock on her radio program Inside the Artists Studio which originally aired on WCOM Carrboro,NC on December 1,2008. The titles to the audio clips are as follows, please click on the highlighted text to listen and as always please feel free to comment or contact me.
Thoughts on function vs form
Do I have a style of my own?
What is my process?
The building of the torso pieces
My favorite piece to build
The piece pictured here Little Big Man 2 is the latest in a series of multifunction forms that I have been exploring over the last few years and I thought might be a good opportunity for me to discuss a little about my design process. The idea of a multifunction form as I defined it was to come up with a visually interesting sculptural form that could be turned or rotated and take on not only a different look but also change function. My process is one in which I do a fair amount of sketching on paper until I arrive at some ideas that I feel are worthy of further development.From there I go to the computer and begin to work on issues of scale, proportion and color and create 3d models which give me a feel for what the finished piece might look like.But invariable I end up building scale models usually using the actual materials I plan for the full sized piece because it is the only way I can truly get a real feel for how all the elements in piece work together.The process in not necessarily a linear one and many times I go back to paper and pencil before I get an idea to the point I am ready to build and often in the process of building I go back to the drawing board. From the beginning of the design process I started drawing this form in pairs and was intrigued by the way they could work both individually and as pair and made the decision I should build two of them and sell them as a pair.From there the decisions got more difficult, I struggled mightily on not the form so much but how to finish it. My bent in most of my work is to highly personalize my pieces with surface designs,images, color and texture and I explored them all here but somehow I ended up with a much more minimalist approach, a little black paint and a clear lacquer finish.The motivation for this could be I was just exhausted from my own process and wanted to finish the piece or I thought it worked better in a simpler form, in the end like all my work it is a work in process and I will let you be the judge as to its success.If you are interested in the piece please comment and give me your feed back if you are interested in purchasing please visit my etsy site.
In keeping with the theme of black friday I have reduced the price on my Little Big Man stool/side table and Red and Yellow #1 cabinet on my etsy site.I have 2 of the Little Big Man in red and one in black available for 500$ plus 75$ in shipping and 1 Red and Yellow#1 available for 900$ plus 150$ in shipping.Enjoy your holiday weekend and stay at home and shop online
Listen live on the internet stream on wcom radio Carrboro NC as I sit down with Chatham Arts director Molly Matlock on Tuesday December 1 and we discuss all thing art on her weekly radio show “Inside the Artist Studio”.Please tune in and give me some feed back on how it went or just ask me to better explain just what it is I was trying to say.
I have posted a scaled drawing of my folding console/ dining because the pictures here and on my website do not fully explain how it functions. As exhibited at the Grovewood gallery the table top is made of figured english sycamore veneer and the base is solid maple with painted details but the materials could be almost anything from simple plywood materials to fancy veneers. In the simplicity of it’s function and ability to seat 6 and then fold away and be placed against a wall this table would be a good match for apartment dwellers and folks living with limited space
My folding console /dining table on exhibit at the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville ,NC
has been featured in the Datebook/Galleries section of the August edition of American Style magazine
Studio Furniture Todays Leading Woodworkers by Tina Skinner which features some of my work is now available from Schiffer Publishing follow this link to order
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