EAMES: The Architect and The Painter

Just saw EAMES: The Architect and Painter as part of this year's SLC Design Week.  It was a fantastic overview of the careers of the husband/wife design team Charles and Ray Eames.  (not familiar with them?  Pronounce it like 'Teams' and think bent plywood mid-century modern chairs).

They were incredibly prolific, not only with furniture design but architecture, medical splints, movies, photography, and exhibits on topics ranging from Thomas Jefferson to mathematics.

One of my favorite quotes:

“I’m a little taken aback by anyone calling himself an artist because of my feeling that that’s the kind of designation that other people should give. You can be an artist in any field, but getting a degree to call yourself an artist would be like getting a diploma to call yourself a genius."  -- Charles Eames

Great Basin Table installed

Great Basin Table, 17" x 41" x 21", 2012.  Steel and plywood.

I had a great trip out the Great Basin National Park to install a piece, give a couple presentations on my work, and help out with the filming of a new documentary on the Park being done by North Shore Productions.

The table was inspired by several of my experiences during my residency there; most notably the idea that there are several visual geometries acting in the Park, sometimes in cohesion and sometimes conflicting with one another.  There are human-made as well as natural and organic shapes and the interplay between them is fascinating.  This of course, is no new revelation (William Fox describes it as 'one of the oldest dichotomies in history, the tension between the organic shape of the natural world and the mathematical grid').

Great Basin Table  at the lower Park visitor center in Baker, NV

I was specifically interested in the shapes we make on the land that are unintended yet beautiful anyway, and the relationship between mathematical forms that at first glance appear as human constructs but show up outside of our influence.

The base of the table is inspired by a specific Bristlecone Pine found high on a ridge of Mt. Washington in the southern end of the Park, and the right-angled forms are placed using the Golden Ratio, a mathematical relationship that describes natural geometries ranging from the curve of the human ear to the spiral of galaxies.  The top is a rough map of Baker, NV, showing dirt roads and the irrigation pivots as seen from satellite imagery.  Baker is the closest town to Great Basin National Park and home to many of the Park employees and caretakers of the Great Basin and its travelers.

table top detail showing satellite imagery-inspired carving

Satellite image of Baker, NV

Golden Ratio

Bristlecone Pine that inspired the table base

Film crew in the sculpture studio

Filming in the Park

Hiking camera equipment up to the Bristlecone grove

Table prepped for filming

The Canyon Table, Part 5

Progress on the Canyon Table . . . steel welded legs powdercoated, finishes tested, and lettering applied to the wood top surface.

The Gambel-oak inspired legs back from the powdercoaters.

I like to test the finish variations before applying them to the actual project.  Then I can see how they react specifically with the wood and carving details I'm using.  After many projects I've got a huge library of finish examples.

Applying the lettering on the table top -- these are the names of some of the actual (and most important, in my opinion) locations on this section of the Green/Colorado

The Canyon Table -- Part 3

Spanish Bottom carving detail

Main table legs rough-cut and welded

Rough carving detail of the Green River and Confluence

The Scoop Table, part 2: Completion

Materials:  Baltic birch, powdercoated steel

The Canyon Table -- Part 2

I try to prototype like I vote – early and often.  The sooner I can see what the materials/volumes/finishes are going to do, the better design decisions I can make.

The Canyon Table will have a map of the topography formed by the Green and Colorado Rivers.  It is a location that is important to me, as well as a metaphor for our journeys through life, their twists, and confluences with others.

3D modeling programs have their place, and as an artist I find them useful for a quick, inexpensive gut check as to sizes and shapes that might work well.  Google Sketchup is intuitive and has a ton of on-line support.  After that stage, I have yet to find a good replacement for actually trying scraps of the material I will use.

The Scoop Table -- part 1

There are a few materials that have held my attention for the past 20 years, and plywood is one of them.

Individual sheets of birch plywood

Plywood is really the workhorse of furniture and construction, yet most times it gets covered by a veneer or painted over.  It is the weird old uncle of the wood world, the one everyone likes to have but no one wants to see.

Layers of birch plywood being laminated together

My first explorations into plywood were to make a series of boomerangs – when sanded the plys emerge and make fantastic patterns that visually accent the airfoil shapes needed to make the boomerangs return.  High-end cabinetry often uses birch plywood, which differs from construction-grade plywood in that it has many more sheets laminated together and has virtually no voids from the gluing process.  It is a fantastic material – because of the cutting and orientation of its layers, it expands and contracts very little with the seasons and moisture content of the air.  The grain of each ply is oriented 90 degrees to the last, so it can be ripped on the table saw in any direction without much worry of splitting, and it can be loaded across each axis as well.  In addition, when sanded through the plys, the end-grain alternates and gives the edge a striped pattern.  Why we would want to hide such a fantastic material underneath a veneer I don’t know.

One of my current projects is to make a steel-based table with a carved plywood top.

 

Metal can actually deform significantly when welded, and I take a lot of precautions to insure that it remains in the shape I want it to.  Often times I will tack weld all of the pieces together before giving it the full weld bead, this way it holds itself in proportion as the individual parts want to expand and contract with the heat of the welder.  In this case I even tack welded extra supports for stability on the cantilevered parts that will be removed later.

Tack welds

Full weld beads ground down