Kitchen Chalkboard
Posted: June 6, 2011 Filed under: Gallery - Visual Leave a commentSome scraps of cherry, a melamine board and one quart of chalkboard paint and we made this piece, which has become essential to our kitchen – both for practical things as well as mark making by our daughter!
Charles Darwin
Posted: June 5, 2011 Filed under: Gallery - Quotes Leave a comment“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a diety. More humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals.”
David Abram: “Becoming Animal”
Posted: June 4, 2011 Filed under: Gallery - Quotes Leave a comment“Darwin had rediscovered the deep truth of totemism – the animistic assumption, common to countless indigenous cultures but long banished from polite society, that human beings are closely kindred to other creatures, and indeed have various other animals as our direct ancestors. Here was a form of totemism transposed into the modern world – the totemic insight now translated into the language of “descent by natural selection from a common ancestor.” This modern version no longer saw different persons as descendants of different totemic animals, but recognized all humankind as derived from a common lineage of creatures. In the wake of Darwin’s bold insights, we have learned to consider all humans as members of a common family. But the wild, animistic implication of Darwin’s insight has taken much longer to surface in our collective awareness, no doubt because it greatly threatens our cherished belief in human transcendence. Nonetheless, it is an inescapable implication of the evolutionary insight: we humans are corporeally related, by direct and indirect webs of evolutionary affiliation, to every other organism that we encounter.“
Richard Manning: “Against The Grain”
Posted: June 4, 2011 Filed under: Gallery - Quotes Leave a comment“America’s Northeast was once U.S. agriculture’s major force, with farms supplying the country’s densest clusters of population. The Northeast now does very little farming, and most of the agricultural lands have gone back to forest or suburbs, an odd transition in that these are in some ways the nation’s best agricultural lands. Unlike the western grasslands, the Northeast gets enough rain to grow crops. The decline came as a result of a particular form of subsidy: federal irrigation projects. Beginning at the height of the progressive era, the nation set to work on making the western deserts bloom, investing billions in dams, canals, tunnels, and drains to bring nine million additional acres under cultivation. The historian Donald Worster has shown that this figure exactly parallels the acreage of abandoned farms in the Northeast – land that already had water – during the same period. What industrial agriculture abandons is opportunity.”
Nursery Furniture
Posted: May 21, 2011 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Gallery - Visual 1 CommentIn January of 2009, during Becca’s third trimester, I was laid off from my job as a cabinetmaker. Whoa! Well, as fortune would have it, the layoff gave lots of free time to complete the furniture I was building for the nursery. And the approaching deadline kept me plenty busy.
I converted an old bookcase into a changing table, adding four storage drawers.
Using all scrap wood, I built a pair of chests, with cherry for the cases and maple for the top.
This is my friend Bill’s house and shop where the furniture was built.
Black Alder Coffee Table
Posted: May 17, 2011 Filed under: Gallery - Visual 2 Comments
Coffee table made of black alder, with a satinwood base and dovetail keys of padauk. This was made in January 2006.
this the source tree, planted circa 1920 in Winnetka, Illinois.
Cherry Veneer Lamp
Posted: May 15, 2011 Filed under: Gallery - Visual Leave a comment
Cherry veneer, hemp twine, and a walnut base. Completed in 2005.
David Abram, “Becoming Animal”
Posted: May 12, 2011 Filed under: Gallery - Quotes 1 Comment“One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat. Suppose however, that a bumblebee is making its way from a clutch of clover blossoms on one side of the road to another cluster of blooms in an overgrown weedlot across the street, and that as it does so the bee happens to pass between me and the flat shape that my body casts upon the pavement. The sunlit bee buzzes toward me, streaking like an erratic, drunken comet against the asphalt sky, and then it crosses an unseen boundary in the air: instantly its glow dims, the sun is no longer upon it – it has moved into a precisely bounded zone of darkness that floats between my opaque flesh and that vaguely humanoid silhouette laid out upon the pavement… That silhouette is only my shadow’s outermost surface. The actual shadow does not reside primarily on the ground; it is a voluminous being of thickness and depth, a mostly unseen presence that dwells in the air between my body and that ground. This living shadow is born afresh every dawn, or rather, the shadow is what remains of the night as the night’s gloom flees the advance of the rising sun.”
an Art Farm 