“Woodcraft”
Published September 22nd, 2009
Cherry wood
11.5″ detail
Although The Art Fly is mainly about my paintings and silverpoint drawings, I also work with wood. For the past few weeks, I’ve been putting long hours into preparing for Works in Wood, a national juried show held in the New Hope Arts Center. The deadline for this came sooner than expected! I wanted to create something that was fun, fine, and functional. So, I decided to design wide mirror frames that give me a nice area on which to apply wood mosaics.
This photo shows one intricate piece of a large frame that will consist of hundreds of individually crafted pieces of natural cherry, walnut, poplar and mahogany woods. I scribe each piece, and then cut the shape out with a band saw. Next comes the tedious hand-crafting and sanding through various grits of paper. Most of the wood strips have compound curves. The wood shapes are spontaneously created and not part of a pre-determined pattern. That would take the fun out of it for me. Very satisfying to work in this way!
More photos of these to come!
