My first wallpiece of the year was in our traditional style, assembled from folded boxes, but I wanted to make another with my newer design style and construction technique, which I refer to as ‘chitin’, like wallpiece RCB 11.04, which recently sold at our show at Manna Gallery. So I began this piece as soon as the previous one was well under way, and finished it yesterday.
The last few times someone has come to us looking to commission a wallpiece they’ve ended up buying one we had already made. But this time our client, who has been talking to us for years, has decided to go ahead with an original design. David went back and forth with the client through several rounds of sketches, ending up with this one:
From that David made up a working plan with depths from which we can build all the parts and construct the wallpiece. If you came by our open studio a few weeks ago, you saw the pile of half-made wallpiece parts, and maybe got a brief demo of the folding process on our half-functional bending brake. Between the open studios, other orders, and building our new studio, we’ve been progressing on this wallpiece rather slowly, but now we’re getting going on it properly.
After building the set of boxes that will compose the wallpiece, we lay it out for David’s inspection, to make final tweaks and to choose the colors.
And then construction begins. As always, it’s a good sign when parts of the piece make up interesting sculptures in their own right.
And this evening it’s fully assembled. Yes, it’s upside down in this picture.
Tomorrow we will disassemble it, prep some of the parts, and begin patination.
We just completed our Eight-hundredth wallpiece. Here it is, wallpiece 11.05 (that is, the 5th wallpiece made in 2011). It is already boxed up and on its way to be displayed at Stowe Craft & Design in Stowe, Vermont. Stowe Craft is showing several of our wallpieces at the moment.
Here is the new wallpiece awaiting final cleaning to be ready for patination. It’s big.
The wallpiece series of six shown in its unpatinaed state back in January is finally finished. Here you can see them all standing together in the studio. Go to our site to see better pictures. We are hoping to put these up at Riva Cucina.
