Furniture Sculpted from Solid Wood
From start to finish, the process wood craftsman David Delthony uses to sculpt and carve his furniture creations shows a curious evolution from wooden craft to artist carving. He starts out with large-scale layered wood blocks of the approximate shape he is ultimately aiming for and slowly trims it down with increasingly refined tools until he is hand-sanding, polishing and finishing a piece.
The resulting banded carved wood furniture collections look almost as if each piece (or at least every part of a piece) were carved from a single solid block of wood. There are no surface variations on any of the ever-smooth sides of a given chair, bench, shelf, desk or table, so only the visual rhythm of alternating colored wooden layers reveal otherwise.
Ranging from readily identifiable as chairs and other pieces of wood furniture to highly abstract works of what look to be wood art, there is a blurring of boundaries between form and function – a spectrum David seems comfortable moving back and forth on from one wooden object design to the next.
“For over 20 years my life has been thoroughly intertwined with the sculptured furniture that I create and the realization of this endeavor has taken me from New York to West Berlin and most recently to southern Utah. The focus of my work has always been the dialog between ergonomics and aesthetic values and I have tried to incorporate and balance these in each object. It is my intention to create functional sculptures without sacrificing artistic values, hence the concept of sculptured furniture.”
“As a furniture artist I sculpt with wood, investigating interior space and defining exterior boundaries. Simultaneously, I utilize the inherent qualities of the material and my knowledge of ergonomics to create organic forms which engage the user through function and my personal visual language. Working within the concept and syntax of fine furniture, I endeavor to infuse my work with an artistic sensuality, embracing visual and tactile senses and encouraging the human contact which defines my vision as an artist.”
