Habitat in a Birdhouse

Usually when I finish a project, regardless of what it is, the flaws - real or perceived - are what I most notice. Maybe it's because I've been looking at the same piece for so long; or maybe I'm too hard on myself. But when I delivered a table to my client Jessica at her new Birdhouse Collectible space in the Mastercraft building (1111 N. 13th St.), I had a different feeling: I felt confident and inspired.

Jessica's table started with a few ideas. She wanted a piece that had a modern, feminine quality. She also talked about how much she liked zebrawood, which besides being prohibitively expensive, is also kind of on my environmentally unfriendly list. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing it's grown in a rain forest or similarly deforested, tropical area. Ultimately, I came up with a curvy cornered, spalted hackberry top with planks joined at irregular angles. The walnut legs curved at each outside corner and slightly tapered and angled out as they approached the floor. As you can see when comparing the original drawing to the the finished photos, I stayed pretty true to the design... with one major exception. What's that red stuff, you ask? No, I didn't hit an artery on the table saw; and the table was not a prop in "Resovoir Dogs". The red splatters and rivulets red marks are resin cast into the surface of the wood. They were also a solution to an unexpected problem with the material.

I bought the hackberry for Jessica's table at a sawmill in Silver City, IA. Most of it was rough cut, meaning the boards hadn't yet been run through a thickness planer to make their surfaces smooth and uniform. To my chagrin, there were wormholes winding across and straight through every board, the remnants of a society of bugs that apparently had once inhabited a stack of boards. I had run across this problem in the past, and had thought of using resin to fill the flawed faces of the boards. This time, it created an opportunity to pull the design together and make the piece more strongly connected to Jessica's business and space. I don't use esoteric titles very often, but in this case, I called the table "Habitat". I'm making more objects - furniture pieces and sculptural forms - that use resin casting while simultaneously casting a spotlight on the complex life of raw materials.

Did I mention that Birdhouse Collectible is a sort of showroom and gallery? It just so happens that I have a few other pieces for sale in the space. If you're interested in seeing those pieces, checking out the Habitat table and more, the Birdhouse Collectible Open House is a perfect opportunity. Come by next Saturday, August 21 from 6 - . I hope to see you there.

Works in Progress

Here's a sneak-peek of a work-in-progress, non-furniture piece I'm working on in my spare time. Like several of the smaller tables I've been making over the last 6 months or so, this piece works on a 30/60-degree angle star pattern. People regularly assume these pieces are created using an inlay. However, inlay (as either marquetry or parquetry) involves placing a pattern or image on top of an underlayment or other structural surface; whereas this piece is solidly handcrafted using 1,000 - 1,500 individual pieces.

It's about 40" square and though you probably can't tell from the photo, the thickness of the individual pieces range from about 1/2" to 1". The woods used to make the angular stripes are cherry and walnut. The colored stars are made of canary wood, blood wood and redheart.

Eventually, the piece will be sanded so that the surface smoothly follows the contour of the individual pieces. When completed, both pieces will be wall-mounted. Before sanding and finishing this piece, I'm going to make a plaster cast that will become a second piece. I still have to figure out how to do that. If I try to pour plaster directly on the wood, the water in the plaster will soak into the wood fibers and ruin the whole piece. Plaster will also stick like glue to a piece with as much texture as this. The plaster casting process will likely involve a combination of rubber and plaster molding. If you have any suggestions, I'd certainly consider them...

These other pieces are a couple examples of smaller fabrications that I've made mostly from the scraps from the above piece and some of earlier star tables. These pieces are also meant to be wall-mounted. The evolution of these pieces will be to make more sculptural, 3-dimensional objects in which these pieces are sort of like walls. But that'll probably be a while.

ORGANISM @ Empty Room - Week 1 Recap & Upcoming...

Doug, Matt & I kicked off the final month of Empty Room one week ago with the opening of ORGANISM: A Festival of Words & Building. After a slow start building, Doug and I have made quite a bit of progress on the Organic Chair, and are looking forward to adding more elements over the next few weeks. We've mostly concentrated on building from noon - 2pm on Saturdays and Sundays, and during the weekly Wednesday Poetry Slams. If you'd like to join us, you're welcome. Just email us at organism1109@gmail.com so we can be sure to prepare. We also welcome guests to just come in and check out the space while we're working too. Here are a few pictures to show our progress:

Matt and his gang of wordsmiths are hosting events Monday - Wednesday evenings, with occasional events during the rest of the week too. To keep up with the poetry schedule, visit The Poetry Menu. Personally, I'm most looking forward to this Wednesday's Haiku Slam, and next week's Sock Puppet Slam. We also post updates nearly every day for fans of the ORGANISM Facebook Page to keep up with us. If you're coming down to ORGANISM Wednesday, you might also check out Doug's presentation at the next Pecha Kucha, which is just across the parking lot at Slowdown, starting at 8:20p.m.

Today also marks the first installment of 3 Share-a-Chair installations that I'll gradually be adding to the space. Learn more about this new ORGANISM element at Share-a-Chair.com.

I'd also like to remind visitors that we're accepting donations. There's no cost to attend any of the ORGANISM events, but there are a couple donation boxes set out. Matt is accepting donations that will support contributing poets and support the Nebraska Writer's Association. Doug and I have a donation box to support the growth of the Organic Chair installation and the Kent Bellows Studio & Center for the Visual Arts.  We're also donating a portion of the sale of objects in the Empty Room to the Bellows Studio, so your support for us also supports exceptional young talent. Bellows Studio Executive Director Anne Meysenburg is also presenting at Pecha Kucha on Wednesday, so if you're interested in learning about the organization, here's a prime opportunity.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to seeing you at ORGANISM!

Fleeting Thoughts like Falling Leaves

One of the reasons I usually enjoy living in Omaha is that I'm basically a small-town guy at heart. And let's face it, Omaha is kind of a small town. I want to think I'm a big city kind of guy; that I'm drawn to the largeness of movement and noise and action, but it's really not true. I travel for work several times a year, usually to larger cities, and after a few days, I usually can't wait to get back HOmaha. Even so, growing up in the midwest - first in Kansas, and for the last 10 years in Nebraska - I think I've had a tendency to take for granted the richness of the midwestern landscape. Who isn't at least a little drawn in by a soft breeze flowing over wheat fields before the harvest? Or the simple pattern of rows of corn, soybeans, and whatever else farmers grow around here?

The leaves started turning and falling in my Benson neighborhood several weeks ago. Initially they fell fast and hard, pulled down by the weight of a premature snow. Soon a wet, yellow blanket was covering the ground.

Over the course of the last few weeks bursts of rusty reds and oranges have joined the yellow blooms in a dying explosion of color. I don't remember the colors being this vibrant before. Or being so drawn to the contrasting tones. I'm nearly overtaken every time I turn a corner on my drive home from my studio. It gives me chills to see the yellow leaves flutter from the tops of the trees after small gusts of wind pull the stems from their branches. I don't remember being this influenced by nature either - maybe marriage is making me soft.

As beautiful as the view is now, we all know the landscape will soon give way to a neutral wash of white and brown. But as with the rest of the natural landscape, the lines and contrasts of brown against the impending snow will display a subtler beauty that is harder to see.

These same past few weeks have been busy ones for me. I've been stealing as many hours in my shop as I can trying to turn these star fabrications into tables. They are also a simple gesture at both capturing and honoring the beauty of the Fall and coming Winter landscapes, respectively. The uniform shape of each piece - both in the star form and each contributing diamond shape - echoes the symmetry and simplicity of the fallen leaves. And like a leaf, the simplicity of their form sometimes masks a design that is more complicated the closer you look; it was not easy cutting and fabricating between 200 and 300 individual, uniform pieces of wood together. As I mentioned in my previous post, these pieces are my attempt to - dare I say - turn over a new leaf, in attempt to make work that is more environmentally sustainable than I've attempted in the past. I like to think that with each successive piece of furniture or art or whatever you'd like to call them, that I'm honoring the materials as much as I can.

These tables are also part of my contribution to the ORGANISM project in the Empty Room. If you'd like to see how they turn out, please stop by ORGANISM throughout November and help us grow the space. Don't forget to bring your hammer.