Fine Art

I have discovered who I would call a very involved artist. His craft includes notice of practicality, form, and concept, but still uses many of the principals of fine art that often aren't found in furniture design, since its more product oriented. This designer is Ettore Sottsass, who's pieces are extremely colorful and sculptural, often deviating from the "norm" of the genre. His furniture often includes shelves at various angles, mismatched arms, and bright colors. He clearly knows how much his craft matters, once saying "A chair must be really important as an object, because my mother always told me offer my chair to a lady."

His work makes me think a lot about how I can use negative space to make my projects more interesting. I also really like how he works patterns in really subtly, yet somehow they're really in your face at the same time. The colors he chooses create an almost illusory feeling when coupled with the  really bold straight lines used in so many of his pieces. He was born in 1917 in Innsbruck (Austria-Hungary) and died in 2007 at the age of 90 in Milan, Italy. He was part of the "Memphis group," a team of international designers who originally creating a forty piece collection of interior decorating and furnishing works. About the Memphis Group, Sottsass says, "Memphis is like a really strong drug. You cannot take too much. I don't think anyone should put only Memphis around: it's like eating only cake."

Joints

This guy, Frank Holworth, does super cool stop motion videos of his woodworking process. When originally shared with me watched about four of them, but one caught my eye in particular. He's building a chair, but the mechanics of it are very puzzle like. I've been relying on glue and nails, but the pieces he creates are held together not only with staples and glue, but are actually crafted in a way that holds the pieces together in a very sturdy way that would definitely be less prone to wear from time, use, weather, etc.

Here's the video!

Current Projects

Currently, I am working on two major furniture projects, and two minor ones. My major projects include one I've been working on bit-by-bit for about 4 months. I'm building a pretty basic pine shelf to put my art supplies into, 4' by 5', with a range of shelf sizes, though they're all one foot deep. I have all the materials and tools needed for the project, which include the wood, stain, sanding blocks/paper, an orbital sander (my baby <3), nails, drill, hammer, and battery pack/hands for a clock I am planting about 4'6" up one side of the shelf. The aesthetics of the shelf are simple at this point, but I have begun burning intricate designs into the wood. design will be semi-symetrical and help the clock not look out of place (a time telling device is another thing I lack in my studio).

The other project is a chair made with paper machè and recycled materials, with the addition of insulating foam for help keeping the structure of those pieces that might otherwise collapse. The outside will have a coat of white paper machè, over which will be the final layer: recycled date-due-cards and pictures from books removed from the collection at the Gordon School Library in East Providence, where I spent a few months volunteering. The smaller projects are items I found that I am refurbishing, so as to learn how various types of furniture are structured, and how they deteriorate/how to prevent deterioration in the initial building/designing process. One of them is the chair pictured below, which I found in a heap in the trash outside of a house on Ogden st. and drove home in my girlfriends convertible. At the stage at which this photograph was taken I had stripped out the broken straw-wicker seating, rinsed and scrubbed mold and dust from the whole thing, sanded the wood, and begun hammering in the top, which had been snapped upwards.