Just as his parents would have, Rose and his wife stopped at a couple of cultural sites – Shaker museums and settlements in New York and Massachusetts. Not long after, a road trip to the East Coast sparked the distinctive furniture for which Rose is now known. I never know why or how I do a lot of these things, but it was very fresh – and I took a shot.”Īfter some good shows and commissions in the early ’90s, Rose and his wife relocated to Wisconsin, purchasing their property in Door County in the spring of 1994. “It was fresh work,” says Nathan, whose Ann Nathan Gallery today specializes in paintings, sculpture, and studio furniture. “I can’t explain it. Even amid tumult, Nathan was struck by what she saw. The exiled art dealers had set up temporary shop at the city’s Merchandise Mart. A huge fire had recently laid claim to her gallery, Objects, along with eight others in the same building. It was 1989, his last year at SAIC, when Rose walked up to Chicago gallerist Ann Nathan with a Polaroid photo of a jewelry stand he’d made – one of his earliest pieces of furniture. He also met his future wife, Suzanne, another SAIC student who is now a fine art photographer. As a student of sculpture, he began making jewelry and casting bronze, combining wood and metal. He was hungry for a broad-based art education, but also eager to work more directly with his hands. Rose returned to the United States in the 1980s, studying photography at Bard College for two years before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “My parents were always taking us on trips to see museums, different cultural sites,” he recalls. His father’s employer, a pharmaceutical company, brought the family first to France, then England. Yet Rose’s road to this place – and his perceptive approach to making – began far outside of Wisconsin. The setup suits the thoughtful, grounded artist. A green mechanical shear dominates the shop floor, as colorful pieces of aging steel rest against the walls. Whatever hits first, the magic is almost certainly in how it all comes together.įor 17 years, Rose has been crafting furniture in Door County, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife, their 10-year-old daughter, Delilah, and a Jack Russell named Daisy. He works in an old creamery, a 100-year-old Belgian-brick structure converted into 2,250 square feet of workspace. Maybe it’s the meticulous craftsmanship, honed skill, and clear vision manifest in his finished forms. Maybe it’s the unexpected material: not wood, but reclaimed steel, soothed with wax finishes. What registers first when you look at Jim Rose’s furniture? Maybe it’s the clean lines of his Shaker-inspired designs, or the bursts of blocky color in the quilt-like panels that brighten drawer fronts and doors. September has other things going on, so it was nice to finish a few things.American Craft Council American Craft Council Main navigation This is one of the four quilts I finished in August. It’s not suitable for every quilt but I like the effect on this one. For the top and bottom, I stitched them together for the full width, before attaching to the body of the quilt. You might notice how the narrow border and outside border are arranged. Seriously, this is a quilt you can decide all these things based on what you have available, and it will look great. I could measure it, but … it doesn’t matter. I don’t know how wide any of those are, off the top of my head. The same raspberry color used in the Diamonds quilt was used for the wider border. Plan B was to use it for sashings and a narrow inner border. Originally I planned to use the turquoise as sashings and outer borders, but once I opened the piece (from stash) I realized it wouldn’t be enough. Other than that I didn’t work very hard at arrangement. I made sure to include at least one orange or green in each stack of four coins, in order to brighten it. The majority of coins are purples and turquoises. One thing that does matter is the distribution of colors. You can make a quilt like this as a mini or wall-hanging, or you can make it to go on a bed, or somewhere in between. They don’t even need to be the same, as long as each long, pieced strip is the same length. Each patch was cut 2″ x 6.5″, but the size doesn’t matter a lot. When I depleted those, I also cut a bit from stash. To make my pieced strips, I cut patches from the oddly sized scraps from the Diamonds quilt.
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