coffee table

The materials for this table come from the wood in the forest. The round shapes of a tree trunk, the gentle curve of a tree limb, this is the birth place of the wood. Its nature is to bend, to curve, to warp. Man fights with this and his brute force has imposed straight lines and flat surfaces with saws, factories and noise.

I'm not proud to tell you that it was a night of drunken debauchery, lewdness, cussing, and looking at pictures of Gary Knox Bennett furniture.

From this I have made a most useful table in keeping with the order imposed by man. These straight forward solutions are spelled out by the materials I have been provided with from the lumber mills. It obeys tradition and social order. It is like the archetypal table. The basic shape is one you see at Pier One or Pottery Barn type retail outlets. I have followed the traditional rules of proportion and function. And as I built I was chaste and celibate, going to church on Sunday and drinking only sacramental wine.

And then at the end of building, perhaps I was tired I gave in to temptation and fell off the wagon. I'm not proud to tell you that it was a night of drunken debauchery, lewdness, cussing, and looking at pictures of Gary Knox Bennett furniture. I returned to the shop only to pass out on the workbench. It was a restless sleep filled with tortured dreams. The guilty pleasures of the night before appeared as hideous beasts lashing onto me and trying to drag me down into the ground as I strained to walk towards the mountain where I could see in the distance at the top, what looked like a school in Boston, perhaps where students created cabriole legs of the utmost refinement.

I awoke with a start to find my table. Some magic had come along and grabbed a corner and pulled the wood back on itself. The shape created returns to nature. The fluid curve is anthropomorphic and felt deep in our soul. We are reminded of the shape of a wave or a dried leaf or flower petal. It has been marked and I am to be forever reminded of my sins.

Lets look a little closer and we see the surface decoration symbolically echoes the theme of the corner. The pattern marches forward with the straight line determination of man. Everything in order. A proper society neat and in line. Then as we approach the curve order gives way to chaos. Our neat little squares break apart. The grid work of housing tracks or cotton fields is broken and sucked into the curl of a giant tsunami. So the rebellion of the wood against it's disconnection from the nature it sprang forth, is captured and held in a stunning frozen moment.