2005 - 2008 - Lamps

A Lantern Table
I'd read an article in Fine Woodworking about "bent wood lamination" and wanted to try my hand at it. I'd also wanted to get away from the standard rectilinear style of almost everything I'd built to date. And then I saw a picture of an occasional table that used a large river rock as the base - the wheels in my head started turning, and the result was this table.I don't think I've ever struggled so much with a project - either before or since. Some of it was the complicated geometry, some of it was my first serious try at inlays, but I think alot of it was just trying to get the piece to meet my ideas of good form and lines.

Of course now that I think about it some more, there really are alot of complicated details - not least the lantern. I've always been fascinated by japanese and chinese lanterns as well as the unique roof lines of alot of traditional oriental architecture, and in this project I tried to explore this in some detail. Great fun - but alot of thought, alot of drafting, and alot of rework. I went through several iterations of paper for the shades in the lantern before I discovered a source of handmade "art" paper right here in Anchorage. The piece sat uncompleted in my shop for the better part of a year before I finally got up the gumption to complete it - but even then it wasn't finished.....


A Craftsman Table Lamp

After completing (or so I'd assumed) the lamp table, I moved right into another lamp, albeit in a completely different style.We'd gone to visit my in-laws in upstate New York for Thanksgiving 2006, and while there I got the opportunity to tour the Stickley furniture factory in Manlius. Gustav Stickley was one of the leading proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement in the early part of the 20th century, and his brothers Leopold and John George founded the furniture factory that is still the leading manufacturer of mission-style furniture. Not sure a tour like that would be everyone's cup of tea - but I was fascinated. Anyway, the tour as well as subsequent reading into the Stickleys and the Arts and Craft movement led me to the inspiration for this table lamp. The shade is a takeoff of Frank Lloyd Wright's "Tree of Life" motif that he used in much of his early stained glass. The base, although imbued with a vaguely Arts and Crafts feel, is pretty much my own invention.

This was a great project to work on my fussy detailing skills. The wood is predominately cherry and walnut, with accents of beech, bloodwood, and mango, and finished with oil and wax. I used handmade paper from the same source as above for the shade.

The Lantern Table Revisited

I was never happy with the way the table top of my lantern table turned out. There were a few dips in the surface from overeager sanding, the mango used in round disk in the middle was punky, and I'd managed to sand through the walnut veneer in a few places. I stared at the thing and let it bug me for over a year before deciding that since I hope that most of my best pieces will outlive me by at least several generations, I didn't want someone 100 years from now impugning my craftmanship. So after completing my coffee table (see separate entry) I swallowed hard, took the lantern table down to the shop, and broke off the table top.

I constructed a new top of two book-matched mahogany boards, and tried my hand at inlay again - this time using padouk, canarywood, and walnut left over from earlier projects. This time - success! Vastly improved. The new top was finished with oil, two coats of rub-on polyurethane, and paste wax buffed to a spit shine. I am finally pleased with the piece.