People sometimes want to know (like, about once every 9 years they ask me), what’s the deal with all the boxes you’re always making and then piling up all over the place? Well, it’s actually super incredibly simple: I just like making ‘em, ’cause of how they’re fun to make, although I admit I’ll probably have to make dozens and hundreds more before they start looking at least halfway how I want ‘em to look. Which is usually how art goes for me, when it goes. Anyhow, lately I’ve been posting these things on Etsy, just for the heck of it, which is partly why I’m behind on drawing new stuff…the other part of the reason being I’ve sort of been distracted by looking at other people’s art, which is a good thing to be distracted by, but also a time-suck, and so I decided today to cut it out and get back to work. Even though, okay, I need to mention, that guy who did that one SoyJoy commercial…wow, his work kicks my butt how cool it is. Except, of course, now I can’t re-find the link in order to share it. Blurg!
But, yeah, the boxes: if they’re ever inspired by anything, it’s not usually by anything much. I mean, you know those ultra-fancy heirloom-style boxes that really elite craft-folk make? The kind you see in museum shops and galleries and whatever (there are currently, for example, some nice tea ceremony boxes in the Phoenix Museum of Art’s onsite store). The kind with ten kinds of exotic woods all bent and polished together into various odd amorphous forms? Well, you know, much as I respect that high-art stuff, that’s not what I’m doing with my so-called work. Instead, I’m inspired by really primitive, junky, sort of accidental un-design. Stuff made with totally mundane materials and used in pretty mundane settings. Like the things I see in random pictures from random books that sort of stick with me a while. Like, if you take a look at page 87 in London Style (Jane Edwards, Taschen Books, ISBN 3-8228-1398-2), there’s this really great homemade cubbyhole/shelf thing hanging on an office wall. And, if you look at pictures all through African Style (Angelika Taschen, Taschen Books, ISBN 3-8228-3917-5), you’ll see all these cool shapes and patterns that are the shapes and patterns I want my boxes to at least echo, a little. And then if you image-search “peruvian retablos” and “nichos“, you’ll see all these boxes with triangle bits sticking up out of ‘em, which seems to me like the very best idea for a simple hanger.
Anyway, obviously, just about any kid or grandmother in Peru or Mexico or Burkina Faso can do this boxy art stuff way, way better than I can do it. I think it’s worth working on, though, as long as it remains a large amount of fun to bang scrap wood together into various little objects. I figure maybe if I do it enough, these objects of mine might eventually start resembling the way more ambitious pictures of boxes I keep imagining in my head.
So…even if they’re really simple and not exactly flashy, here are a few pictures of the boxes in my studio, to show how I’m using the ones I don’t plan on selling.
