Spotlight: Marquetry Tambours

My fourth post about pieces in the Free Verse exhibit at the Messler Gallery at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship is about two pieces with marquetry-embellished tambours.

You’ve probably seen tambours even if you didn’t know what they were called: they’re those movable slats on things like roll-top desks. To make a tambour, you line up a bunch of thin strips of wood and glue a flexible material like fabric to the backside. You then slot those strips of wood into grooves in your piece of furniture so that they can slide freely along the grooves. There are often screened-off, narrow gaps on the inside of the piece of furniture so that you can’t see the tambours when they are in their open position. It’s a relatively simple concept, but you have to be very meticulous to execute it.

And then, if you want to make things really complicated, you can decorate the tambours with marquetry.

That’s exactly what visual artist and woodworker Chelsea Van Voorhis did with her piece, Creation. Creation is a wall-mounted cabinet with four compartments, each with a tambour door decorated with marquetry. When the tambours are closed, the cabinet depicts the sun with plants reaching toward it from the corners; when the tambours are open, they reveal a second layer of marquetry, depicting a moonlit sky, on the inside of the compartments. (I didn’t get a photo of the open tambours, but here’s a link to a picture.) Every step of this process required extensive planning and absolute precision by Chelsea so that there would be no gaps in the marquetry image and so that the tambours would open and close smoothly.

If that level of complexity isn’t enough for you, you could do what woodworking collaborators Spider Johnson and Cindy Goldman did and make your tambour slats ~~ wavy ~~. On the front of their cabinet Wonderland, Spider and Cindy’s image of Alice falling down a hole into Wonderland is affixed to gently undulating tambour slats. They fit together seamlessly when the doors are closed and slide just like traditional straight-edged tambour slats. When the tambours are open, they are masked behind a psychedelic screen on the inside of the cabinet.

(Photo thanks to Michael Boyle)