Photo By Gail
Wouldn’t it be fun to be the person who designs the coin-operated Kiddie Rides that you sometimes still see out front of suburban grocery stores and strip malls? They aren’t as easy to find now as they were when I was a kid back in the stone age, but I still enjoy documenting them whenever see one. Because, nostalgia.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Dino The Dinosaur Kiddie Ride
All Photos By Gail
Wendell Castle (1932 – 2018) was one of America’s most important contemporary furniture makers, with several distinct stylistic phases in his career. At first he employed both exotic and native American woods to produce furniture characterized by biomorphic forms and attenuated surrealism.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Wendell Castle, Nirvana Armchair
All Photos By Gail
Humor: That quality in an expression of ideas which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous; a comic or amusing quality.
Christian Francis Roth brings both wit and flawless workmanship to his designs; as Roth himself noted, without quality the humor of his fashions would fall flat.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Christian Francis Roth, Crayon Dress
Photo By Gail
Robert Reed (1938 – 2014) considered Plum Nellie, Sea Stone (1972) as a landscape. In it, a clearly defined rectangle of exposed canvas draws the viewer’s eye to the middle of the painting. Bold purple strokes of paint jostle at the rectangle’s sides. The work is part of Reed’s Plum Nellie series, which was exhibited in his solo show at the Whitney in 1973. In addition to referencing its color palette, the title recalls the southern expression “plum nelly.” Reed remembered the phrase to near “damn near,” suggesting that his relationship to abstraction is as much about the process of getting there as it is about arriving at a destination.
Photographed at The Whitney Museum in NYC.
Photos By Gail
Would you like to relax and stretch out on a long, fluffy sofa the color of a giant eggplant? Who wouldn’t? The Campana brothers are famed Brazilian furniture designers. Most celebrated for their design of the Vermelha chair — an iconic piece handmade from a huge length of rope, wrapped and woven to create the chair’s nest-like structure. As you can see by their Bolotas Sofa, in a vibrant shade of Aubergine, Umberto and Fernando Campana continue to create brightly colored, whimsical statement pieces for the home.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Campana Brothers Bolotas Sheep’s Wool Sofa