Born and raised in the heart of New England, furniture designer David Rasmussen has forged westward with his eponymous furniture studio, bringing his background in heirloom-quality carpentry and fabrication to Colorado. Rasmussen synthesizes influences as diverse as Danish, Ming Dynasty and contemporary American studio furniture.
His entire portfolio, from tree houses to art panels, is worth a look, but a couple of his tables caught my eye:
The "Artichoke" is a table that has been painted to look like its namesake.The Artichoke table was designed to represent an organic form that has been split to reveal its core, in this case the cross section of an artichoke. The body of the table is made from shop-molded plywood faced with exceptional zebra wood veneer and coopered to form the elliptical shell. Cocobolo legs are mortised into the shell to make this table heirloom quality. Artist Scott Harris skillfully executed the acrylic painting on the top of the table. The painting has been sanded flat and treated to act as a durable tabletop.
The overall effect is distinctly biological, not least for its floral hues, while the drum-like form also evokes a melon despite its concentric trompe l'oeil core. (There's also a red cabbage version
The "Lego" table, a collaboration with Amee Hinkely, is essentially an abstracted version of the "Artichoke," intended to resemble the "polished core [of] a geode," though the concentric colors also evoke a polychromatic vegetable cross-section. The surface is best described as an inverted, elongated geodesic dome, making for an uncanny juxtaposition of order and chaos. However, the repurposed school chair legs strike me as a bit out of place, short of detracting from the piece as a whole.
"Curve A Linear" easy chair and side table are among the more straightforward designs in Rasmussen's portfolio: the pair lies squarely within the mid-century modern tradition, "inspired by the very best of Danish design."
The "Treehouse" stool (below), made from dark claro walnut, looks something like a Dadaist easel, taking its name from the setting for which it was (originally) designed. Rasmussen attributes his unique style partly to his experience at Vermont's Forever Young Treehouses; when he "returned to his roots in furniture after a few years of building treehouses," he'd gained "the organic understanding that is required for building in the trees."
The "Nautilus" chair, on the other hand, arose from a completely different wellspring:A Chinese armchair from the Ming Dynasty inspired the form. Unlike this chair's Chinese counterpart, the stays that form the back of the chair also serve as the arms. The seat is fashioned from hand-shaped beetle-kill lodge pole pine. Both the seat and stays are painted with custom-tinted milk paint. The metal base chair emerges from the voids between the slats to give the design a lighter feel.
The concept and form are compelling, but again, the legs seem a little off to me: contrary to the description, the base strikes me as a bit heavy for its cage-like appearance.
The "Plank" bench also takes a vaguely scholastic aesthetic, both for its color and slightly exaggerated form. Attention to detail, as always, is paramount: the rivets are exposed on the steel back but not the planks themselves.
The balance of Rasmussen's portfolio consists of MCM-meets-Mother Nature pieces, such as the "Overlap" table (above) and the "Dovetail" console. These one-of-a-kind articles of furniture underscore Rasmussen's overarching concern with the notion of heirloom objects—those which will outlast their original owner and be passed down for generations.
Of course, perhaps the most impressive aspect of Rasmussen's practice is the overall coherence of his portfolio—no small feat, considering that he's working from influences that span centuries and continents. Check out the rest of his work here.
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