Marquetry

Tool Cabinet – The Surface Design

My parquetry design for the tool cabinet is a residual memory from the Roentgen Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in February 2013.  Which itself makes for a somewhat amusing story.

I detest cities.

The bigger the city, the greater the animus.

It sorta explains why I live happily in a county of fewer than 2500 people, almost 200 miles from Ground Zero.  That means I view NYC pretty much as a barbarian coven.  During my career at the Institution I had to travel there several times to work at the national design museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, and near the end of my tenure to install the Chinese Pavilion exhibit in Queens.  Mrs. Barn had to hear my griping about these trips and that fetid megalopolis for weeks before and after the fact (I never did get used to the stench of the place).  I recall once riding the train with my pal MikeM to Manhattan for an editorial meeting at Simon&Schuster, and as we walked out on to the sidewalk from Grand Central station I instantly turned to him and said, “Okay, I’ve had enough.  I’m ready to go home.”  I may be twice his size but he is Sicilian, so he won the argument.  That particular book in question never came to pass mostly because by the time push came to shove, I had lost interest.

A couple months after I retired, I announced to Mrs. Barn that we would be making a day trip to NYC to attend the mondo Roentgen furniture exhibit at the Met.  Her dumfounded expression confirmed her suspicion that aliens had abducted her husband and replaced him with a metrosexual or some other life form.  I was adamant that we would not stay overnight so we caught the 5AM train and arrived at Penn Station about 8.30.  Rather than subject myself to the subway system or a cab ride I made her walk all the way to the Met.  That’s 3-1/2 miles.

My friend M, a conservator at the Met, gave us a guided tour of the exhibit complete with a running commentary of some of the technical features of the pieces she had examined and conserved.  It was a grand day, complete with lunch at the fancy schmancy Met restaurant and an afternoon session examining the contents of the Duncan Phyfe tool chest before a delicious meal at a restaurant en route back to Penn Station and heading home, arriving sometime around 2AM.  The day was totally worth it, even for an urbaphobe like me.

Anyhow, even though the Roentgens were best known for their innovative veristic marquetry creations, I found greater resonance with their parquetry.  Some of those parquetry expressions never left my consciousness and when it came time to start noodling this tool cabinet the visual memories came flooding back.  Almost immediately I gravitated to an alternating diamond-and-stringing concept for the presentation surface.  As I mentioned before I was using 18thC white oak for my veneers rather than the exotics favored by Roentgen patrons.

Equipped with my vision for segmented 60-120-60-120 parallelogram diamonds I started rough cutting the sawn veneers from which I could begin to assemble the diamonds which would then be sawn and trimmed en toto.

I recognized early on I had to devise a precise method to both saw the 30-60-90 triangle segments, and then to layout, saw and trim the completed diamonds perhaps even more precisely.

Stay tuned.