Flight
Marci Jan Bronstein

As a writer, I’ve always been interested in the way images come to represent and reflect human experience. These associations come from very deep inside and accompany one through life.

Many years ago, when I was recently divorced, I moved to a new city and took a new job, attempting to re-start my life. I was young and broke, with a pile of debt that had to be paid off with my meager salary.

A good friend owned a gallery, and it is there that I bought my first painting. I made a lay-away arrangement with the gallery, paying $50 a month until the piece was paid off. When I finally took it home, I was so proud of my first major art purchase!

The painting was a large abstract of birds in flight. To me, it represented freedom and movement through life with confidence and happiness. At a time in my life when I wanted to stretch my own wings and fly, this image was a talisman that helped carry me forward.

Today, so many years later, this painting lives in my bedroom, greeting me every morning. And, I love all images of birds in flight, as I continue to try and find new ways to stretch my wings.

Flowers Tea Light
Lilach Lotan

Lilach Lotan makes jewelry for the home (otherwise known as lighting). I first saw the work of this young Canadian artist at a show in Philadelphia a few months ago and fell in love with her small, porcelain tea lights. They truly glow in the dark, gracing as well as adorning the spaces they occupy.

How lucky we are that artists today are working with every imaginable material to create lighting! Their designs range from bare bones high tech to sculptural to the consciously ornate. They are creating lighting that stands on the floor, sits on the table, hangs from the ceiling, leans against the wall, is attached to the wall, and everything in between.

I am a self-confessed lamp freak. All of my lamp “treasures” serve to shed light on my activities and inactivities and transform the rooms of my home. Seeing these Lotan tea lights make me realize that I probably need one or two small pieces of lighting jewelry to sit on my piano…

Tarantula Table
Kino Guerin
Photo by Elyse Belanger

To the casual observer, furniture design appears to be a matter of basics. Chairs need legs and backs, tables have to be elevated from the floor, beds should be horizontal, cabinets need shelves at least and probably doors as well. And yet the artists who create furniture continue to surprise me with their originality. The adage “there is nothing new under the sun” is wrong. There is always something fresh and different under the studio furniture maker’s sun.

Witness the work of Kino Guerin, an artist from Quebec who is new to The Artful Home. His bent wood tables are seemingly fluid, almost like a body in motion as captured in a photo. I feel as if his “Tarantula Table” is going to walk across the room to shake hands with me! As our juror Michael Monroe noted, this bent wood technique is really difficult, yet Guerin makes it appear effortless. WOW.

What the artist brings to the ABC’s of furniture is fresh ideas, inventive techniques, unexpected materials, and a sculptor’s eye and view of the world – even the mundane world of things to sit on, eat around, sleep on, and store in. And our lives are the better for it.