Spotlight: Dyed Veneers

For my second post about pieces in the Free Verse exhibit at the Messler Gallery at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, I’m highlighting two artists who made use of dyed veneers in their marquetry.

Wood naturally comes in a huge array of colors, but there are some hues that you can only get from dyes. In order to use dyed wood in a marquetry project, the dye needs to completely permeate the veneer. If it is only on the top surface, the color will be lost when the piece is sanded. There are places to buy commercially-dyed veneers, and there are also many enterprising woodworkers who dye veneer themselves. Poplar is a popular type of wood for dyed veneers, both because it is naturally light in color and because it is porous enough that dye can seep through the wood fibers relatively easily.

Shannon Bowser is a woodworker, painter, and designer whose work draws attention to the tiny details of the natural world. In many of her woodworking pieces, her palette is the browns, grays, and creams of natural wood, but for her Lichen Cabinet, she used some bright dyed veneers to great effect. While doing a fellowship at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Shannon photographed lichen growing on the campus, and the larger-than-life lichens on her cabinet look bold and beautiful with their bright red crowns and green frills. (I didn’t get a photograph of it, but the inside of the cabinet is lined with the same bright red veneer as the lichens on the outside.)

Brian Reid is a furniture maker and educator who teaches at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and the Maine Prison Outreach Program. Like Shannon, his portfolio mostly features natural wood colors, but for his piece Piho, he incorporated blue and green dyed veneers to contrast with the wild oak that forms the structure of his cabinet. The colorful, floral squares on the door of the cabinet remind me of silkscreened sheets of Yuzen origami paper.