Spotlight: Marquetry Portraits

For my third post about pieces in the Free Verse exhibit at the Messler Gallery at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, I’m highlighting two artists who, using their own very different styles, made portraits of people

Isaac Sintim is a visual artist from Ghana who specializes in marquetry portraiture. Sintim’s piece for the Free Verse show is called Adinkra Okodee Mmowere, which translates to The Talons of an Eagle. Looking through photos that I took at the Messler Gallery, I kept noticing how photorealistic this portrait looks when it is view from afar in the background of pictures. But viewed up close, it looks entirely different. As Sintim wrote in his artist statement for the show, he is interested in “representing figures as fragmented geometric compositions,” and this piece is a great example of that style.

I don’t think that Sintim has a website, but you can read an interview with him here.

James Macdonald is a woodworker, luthier, and musician, as well as the curator of the Free Verse exhibit. Among other things, James makes solid body electric guitars decorated with intricate marquetry images. In his piece That Summer Concert, he shows an audience member swept up in the joy of the musical experience. James adds an incredible amount of texture and shading on top of his marquetry by scorching the wood with a hot metal pen. James told me that he made this guitar in a hurry so that it would be finished for the gallery show, but you would never guess that he rushed any part of this project based on all the little details and embellishments.