DEPARTMENT OF TANGENTS
River Art Design
Here is a draft design for a piece of riverside art, to be placed on public land near the Napa River in the City of Napa. The project is financially supported by a grant from Arts Council Napa Valley, with additional labor donated by the artist and by Friends of the...
Arts Council Napa Valley Awards Grant for Napa River Art
In partnership with Friends of the Napa River, Robert Zlomke has received a grant from Arts Council Napa Valley to create a piece of riverside art. The project will use large woody debris from the river to create a sculpture at the river's edge celebrating the river...
Hall Tables
Last fall, when I was making plans for the winter, a gallery owner I've known a long time happened to mention something about hall tables, and for some reason the idea took root. It struck me that a simple one-drawer table at counter height, which one might place in...
Proposing River Art
A while back I mentioned a letter of inquiry to an arts funding organization, which I submitted in partnership with the Friends of the Napa River organization. We want to create riverside art out of woody debris that originated in the river system. We were invited...
Taco Bench
We made a bench last year, now on display at the Highlight Gallery in Mendocino, that was inspired by a chunk of cypress wood we salvaged in the fall of 2014. I remember the day it arrived in our shop, one of several similar pieces discarded by a local mill...
Environmental Art
I am working on a letter of inquiry to a San Francisco Bay Area organization that funds collaborative projects between artists and nonprofit organizations. I found out about them a couple of years ago, and an idea for a public art project has crystallized just in time...
Plugging a Bolt Hole
I'm looking at a bolt hole in a piece of old growth redwood. This wood was recycled out of an old bridge somewhere in Northern California and was expensive when I bought it several years ago. The bolt hole is 3/4" across, with the surrounding area heavily blackened...
Making Music and Furniture
I was talking to my brother, who is on the point of retiring from a 40-year career as an orchestral musician. He was until recently co-principal double bass with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva, but his retirement ambition is to become a street musician....
Forty Years Ago, cont’d.
Forty years ago we moved into an old apartment at 520 Oakland Avenue in Oakland, one that needed a lot of work. We landed there because it was the one downstairs from our old friend Nancy, with whom we stayed after our arrival back in town, and it became available at...
Forty Years Ago
Memories of the late 1970's are rolling into my mind. Forty years ago Evelyn and I arrived back in northern California after two years in Germany, where I had taught English in a German secondary school while she studied textiles nearby. We had plans for further...
Nature
I frequently make tables out of slabs of wood. When slabs are cut from a log, the long edges typically have an irregular curved shape, showing where the edge of the log was. Those irregular edges are something special, since they remind you of the living tree that the...
What is Craft, Anyway?
The activity of making furniture or other useful objects of wood on a small scale, like other activities usually thought of as craft, has a strong feeling of tradition associated with it. Ever since John Ruskin, such activities have basked in an aura of pre-capitalist...