Arch Table

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I love this photograph. My friend, Emily Hague, took the picture. That, in the background, is the building that houses my studio/workshop. It’s a big, ugly old structure that was built in the late 1920’s on the foundations of an even older building that had burned down. It’s got 12-inch-thick solid concrete walls, lots of large windows with steel factory sash, and 11-foot-high ceilings. I would never call the place charming, but it’s definitely got “character”.

This is where I work. I’ve been in this space for over ten years now, and this is where most of my best work has been conceived and produced. Including, as it turns out, the table pictured above.

I got a note this past week from a person who had discovered my work online. After looking through all the pictures in my portfolio, he named this piece as one of his two favorites. It caused me to go back and look at it again. It’s not a big table, but it’s got a bold presence. The base is quite sculptural and was inspired in part by a magnificent old stone railroad bridge about a mile from my shop. It’s known simply as The Arch Bridge.

But it was the top that was the impetus for the piece. It is made from an old red oak board provided by the customer who commissioned the table. The board had special meaning to him, it had a story. By incorporating it into this table I wrote a new chapter to the story of that old piece of wood. And, in the process, I started a new story, the story of the Arch Table.