Spotlight: Gone Fishin’
For my last post about pieces in the Free Verse marquetry exhibit at the Messler Gallery at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, I’m going to write about the piece that my dad did, called Gone Fishin’. The piece incorporates some of the things that I posted about previously, including non-wood materials, tambours, and marquetry fish and birds. I’m pretty partial to it, so I’m writing about it separately.
My dad actually made the panels for the cabinet at least a decade ago. He'd gotten some reconstituted stone from a company called Masecraft that he wanted to try out as a veneer material, so the fish were a way to test that out. Reconstituted stone is made from real stone, ground into a fine powder, and pressed back into a solid block with resin. Manufacturers of reconstituted stone can even mimic the patterns found in the original stones, as you can see in the teal material on the fish’s backs. Real stone would be impossible to cut and shape with ordinary shop tools, but reconstituted stone is soft enough that it can be cut more like wood. It’s a popular material for specialty knife handles, but it also works well as a veneer. Copper and brass, which my dad used for the heron’s bill, can also be cut much like wood veneer, although they are a little too hard for the tiny scroll saw blades that we use.
After my dad made the marquetry panels, he put them aside and forgot about them. When he found them while cleaning a long-neglected corner of the woodshop, he decided that he would use them to make a piece for the Free Verse show.
The wood for the structure of the cabinet is bubinga, a hardwood from central Africa. Two species of bubinga are endangered, while a third is listed as near threatened. The origin of the board that my dad used is unclear; it was given to him by a friend who had inherited it from a relative. The friend was moving across the country and couldn’t bring the board with him. The board was very heavy because bubinga is a dense wood. The board, while it seemed huge when it was all in one piece, was just barely large enough for the cabinet. My dad ended up using almost every scrap of wood from it. Towards the end, he was gluing together tiny scraps so that all the wood that was visible on the outside of the cabinet would match.
My dad decided to make a drinks cabinet, with a compartment with regular doors at the top for bottles, a compartment in the middle with tambour doors for glassware, a pop-out tray to mix drinks, and two drawers at the bottom.
Our friend Tony, who often assists with cutting MDF and gluing up panels, was a huge help in making the tambour doors. It was also his idea to make the accents out of white holly.
I really love the marquetry on this piece as well as the design of the cabinet, and I’m so glad that I got to see it in progress.
All photos thanks to David Ryan