Wow.
You know an ad company has done its job when you set through a 3 minute ad over and over.
Stumbled on this gem through TED.com, which is rapidly becoming my favorite internet thing EVAH!
Christy Oates, 2011 - 12 various wood veneers - 48 x 48”
From Christy’s website:
“The E-waste Project was inspired by discarded electronic equipment at an e-waste recycling center. Although this piece was assembled by hand, it was designed in a computer-aided drafting program and all the pieces were laser cut. The concept is to create a link between manufactured products and manufactured art. It poses the question, “Does the art hold less value if it is made by a machine?” ”
My answer – Christy’s project wasn’t made by a machine; it was made by an artist with a remarkable penchant for visualization and organization. The laser cutting machine is simply a tool that performs the otherwise mind-numbing task of cutting all those little pieces of veneer.
Is an engineer’s work less valuable if he abandons the slide rule or the adding machine to use the highest and best technology available? Of course not. Any reasonable person would call him insane if he didn’t. And he would be unemployed. Why then should any artist or craftsman be expected to cling to what others consider to be historical or classical methods (i.e. executing all their work “by hand”)?
Kudos to Christy for using the best technology available to accomplish her task.
I’m going out to buy a laser cutter right now.
(Source: christyoates.com)
Marquetry on a stick by Ameila Bauer - I wish I knew how she did this.
(Source: ameliabauer.com)
Paul Schürch is a master marquetarian and an even better teacher. I took his 5 day marquetry class in 2009 and became hooked, enabled, and obsessed. I suppose you can learn marquetry from a book, but live personal instruction cannot be beat.
(Source: schurchwoodwork.com)
Alison Elizabeth Taylor - Security House
This 10 foot by 8 foot piece of marquetry hung on the wall at the SCAD gallery in Atlanta where I saw it for the first time last December (2010). The scale and the detail in this piece are truly breathtaking, and though I kept walking away from it to roam the gallery, I kept coming back to stand and gaze at this one piece. It sucked me in. There is detail that must be witnessed in person. The cactus, for instance, in the center of the piece bears hundreds of pairs of spines, each of which are composed of three separate pieces of veneer, one for each spine and one for the follicle.
(Source: jamescohan.com)
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
—Steve Jobs in a 1995 Wired interview, one of 200 profound, inspirational, insightful quotes in I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words (via curiositycounts)
(via moneyisnotimportant)
Marquetry master Silas Kopf delivers a tutorial on marquetry assembly.
Anatoly Tsiris turns HUGE vessels on his ENORMOUS lathe. His finished pieces are exquisite; but the most impressive quality of his work in my opinion is the sheer scale. This guy is, above all things, an engineer, and he clearly finds enjoyment in the process.
Cartier watchmaker composes a marquetry “bear” for a watch face…
I want one.
Self Portrait 1 - This marquetry piece began with a color photograph. With significant photoshop manipulation, I created a stylized image that was overlaid with tracing paper and traced with pencil. This line drawing became the template with which I cut 4 varieties of veneer to compose the finished piece.
