Okay, off to New York for the opening of the show. Hope to see you in Brooklyn!

Check out address and time at www.gestarcgallery.com

End of Before the After

These are the last two sketches for the Before the After series. The first being the entry; this could be a very light touch project-the rug, Eames Hang-it-All and hand-me -down entry hall table and mirror are in place. All I need it this RED bench I designed to be made. It will hold umbrellas, and shoes in the shelf underneath.

The bathroom is alittle more involved but we have all the pieces. The two sinks are from the Cafe project(more on that next week), the floor will be left over tile from that project as well. the vanity we will build and the blue chandelier I will paint one that we moved out of the living room. I hope to get these small projects done this summer.

Before the After: Bedroom

Here is the next project. The Bedroom.
We have all white furniture with some pretty great Ikea duvat covers but the final touch will be the drapery. I have this idea that drapery could have an heirloom quality, made by hand and past down through the years. I also came upon this image from Eva Hesse's www.evahesse.com work. The different materials intrigued me and I am currently knitting the middle parts of the curtain and when we come back from New York I will set about making the rest in muslin.

Before the After: Garden

The yard at 305 GS is enormous. Being from brooklyn we are completely overwhelmed. It is a space I want to be in; I have visions of "starlight,candle suppers". But where to start???? Here are some sketches of a very big idea, with a long black bench that bi-sects the yard, to make two gardens-one shady and one sunny and productive. then add an orange dinner table. Boy I have a long way to go on this one...to date i have put in four tomato plants and taken a blanket on in the middle to read the paper.

Before the After: Living Room

The most beautiful room in the house is the front Living Room. . Basically, I would like to have a tree green rug, the Autoban octopus lamp and the pillows on the sofa be the only color. The chairs and sofa along with the walls I want to be grey tones and black. This is a picture of my dream chair The Harry Bertoia Asymmetric chaise for that room and the color of the Peter Fasno linen that I will cover the sofa in.

Buildings; 305 Greensboro Street

Well, The chairs are not finished and with my travel schedule coming up it-they might not get done until next week. So I have moved on to Buildings. Last summer my family and I made a big move from Brooklyn New York to Starkville, Mississippi! My daughter and I fell in love with this house. Since then I have been slowly working through the project of making it "our house". We have of course been completely distracted with work and life but I still set aside sound time to work what we can right now. Basically upgrading furniture, real beds for everyone!!! Rugs, art-the fun stuff first and then next year we will put some architectural muscle into it. Alot of my philosophy when I design spaces is about the balance of color and objects. So I am using this as an laboratory for such ideas. One thing that I see in other blogs and design media is there is alot of "Before and After" but never drawings or sketches of , well "Before the After". So since I am in this funny place in the project where the After is along way off- I am going to share the preliminary work to show what I aspire to.

Paint finish/Chair End

I forgot to give a "shout out" to Mythic Paints out of Hattiesburg, MS. I wanted to paint the finish the chairs in a local product and low and behold this company is local and is a non toxic product. Evidently I am not suppose to be using house paint for furniture but as of yet the coverage is great, color rich and beautiful, and the finish is pretty tidy for a hand painted finish. www.mythicpaint.com

Chair End

So this is the end of the week and I had hoped that I would have all ten chairs ready to show for this post-oh well, its raining-paint won't dry.blah,blah. I will work through the weekend and hopefully I can show all ten!

Walker Evans Builds a Chair

Most of my work has a double life; one fictional and one pragmatic. This chair will ultimately been used in The Little Building Cafe, a project we are doing here in Starkville, MS. But the way that I got to the method of making was to ask myself, "If Walker Evans was in need of a chair how would he make one?" That got me to really look at the chairs around me, the disguarded chairs everywhere and how to make them as precise and clear as a Walker Evans image.

Chairwork 3

This week will be all about the process of the chairs. Before I had the courage to do surgery to the actual chairs; I made drawings from the polaroids and from my head. One thing I did notice from the different ways that I put the chairs in space is that if they exist in a room they are objects only and in this world things to consume but if I put them in a space they immediately have a story.

The beginning of chairwork

These polaroids were the first acts of working with the chairs. I had been looking the work of Walker Evans and reading about the southern United States between the Civil War and the Depression. There seems to been a on going conflict with modernity and nostalgia. Finding the everyday kitchen chair and deconstructing it seemed to be the way to talk about this conflict. Evans resolved it in his photographs with a slight surrealistic pop in various images. I felt that the balance between surrealism and the past would be an interesting way to make a chair.

The Beginning: Chairs and Buildings

This is the beginning of archiving a years worth of work and putting it out into the world. Currently, Caleb and I are getting ready for a show at the Gestarc Gallery in Brooklyn and these chairs will also be exhibited at the Design Within Reach Store on Columbus Ave. in Manhattan. The opening is April 24th, 2008. The Gestarc opening is on May 1st,2008. More chairs and buildings tomorrow.