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During Covid, the long drive to Montana to visit my bronze foundry became problematic, along with my usual two-night stay in a motel there, and dinners in restaurants. I could not get comfortable with all of that. Later in the Covid period, I learned that my foundry was going out of business so I wouldn't be able to keep casting bronze, as other foundries within a day's drive of my home and studio were for various reasons not possible for me to work with after my long collaboration with Art Castings of Montana. For these reasons I needed to find, and indeed did find, a new creative outlet: taking shabby old pieces of furniture and using their distinctive shapes to reimagine them and give them a colorful new life, in my studio at home in Wyoming. Some of the pieces I transformed were already in my basement, others I was given once this body of work had begun to develop, and now increasingly I buy likely candidates at second-hand stores. 
 

In each case, all the time while I am sanding, patching, re-sanding and priming, I am getting in touch with the shapes that made up the piece and figuring out what will be the best thing for that shape to become. Sometimes it will take six months or more of having a piece in the studio, where I can see it every time I go in and think about what I could possibly do with this tired old object to make it fresh, lively and amusing, before it suddenly hits me what the solution to the problem is going to be. 

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Some of these uses of the forms of the wood (usually but not always a chair) that please me the most are the fruit-and-vegetable chair's carrot and radish spindles and zucchini-blossom legs, and the waterhole chair's giraffe backs. The trompe-l'oeil folding table was a good flat surface for an idea I already had before starting to work on that piece. The ladder backs of the Mondrian chair and the Climbing the Ladder chair, and the bentwood arms of the Peacock Rocker also utilize the forms in what I think are original ways.

 

This is just a small sampling of the roughly twenty pieces I have done to date. Most of the earliest pieces are not for sale--I have incorporated them in my house and want to keep them--but increasingly I am running out of places to put new pieces and am beginning to consider parting with them. (Interested in anything? Make me an offer!)  I would also enjoy doing commissions.

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For enlargements and other information, click on the pictures.

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