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Art & Engineering MAY/JUNE 2012

Sculptor Michael Enn Sirvet sits back in his studio office in industrial Beltsville, Maryland, taking a rare break. Within view of his metal-cutting and sanding equipment, draped for protection against flying dust, Sirvet lets fly a wistful thought: He would have liked a little more time with the dining table he created for the apartment of a sports legend.

Sirvet reminisces about this first major commission. The polished aluminum table featured a lacy pattern of holes—one for each point scored during the player’s legendary career. That involved placing 32,292 holes, captured like balls in a nine-by-four-foot rectangular surface. Adding to the complexity, the scattered holes only overlap at the table’s corners, where its top folds down over perfectly aligned, pierced legs.

Though the design appears effortless, Sirvet actually spent several months working out its intricate pattern. It took three weeks for a skilled machine shop in nearby Jessup, Maryland, to drill the thousands of precisely placed openings on a state-of-the-art, computer-controlled milling machine. When parts were bent and assembled into final form, “The shippers were waiting,” Sirvet recalls nostalgically.

The reflective moment passes as Sirvet enthusiastically expresses thanks for the opportunity this important commission gave him. “It pushed the limits of what you could do technologically with one piece of aluminum that size,” he says. “How many people get to create that?”

Over the dozen years that Sirvet has been sculpting, he has crafted metal, wood and plastics; worked with manual and industrial processes; and designed for private, public and commercial settings.

A retrospective of his work is now on view among the contemporary European furnishings displayed in the ADLON showroom in Georgetown. His small- and large-scale sculptures are displayed on tables, mounted on walls and suspended from the ceiling. Fans can also view Sirvet’s work at the Farragut West Metro, where his new public sculpture wraps two exterior walls with a series of openwork metal discs that glow with amber light like galaxies of stars.

Throughout his evolving career, one characteristic has distinguished Sirvet from many other artists. “I am a science geek,” he readily acknowledges, crediting his father, “a brilliant mechanical engineer,” for this interest. He points to a lifelong love of nature—growing up among the forests and wetlands of northern New Jersey, later camping at some 45 national parks—as his inspiration.

Sirvet received a degree in finance and art history from Fordham University before deciding to study engineering at the University of Maryland. He took sculpture classes too, and stresses the links between science and art. “Structural engineering is more creative than people think,” he says. “You’re designing skeletons of buildings. You’re working closely with architects, suggesting alternatives such as ‘If you want this, it will cost $80,000. If you do it this way, it’s $8,000.’ You are in a creative process at the same time as the technical part.”

Sirvet worked as a professional engineer for 10 years, but soon felt sculpture’s pull. The magnet became stronger in 2000, when his friend, sculptor Sam Noto, suggested that Sirvet create a piece to exhibit at DC’s Artomatic that year. Noto also offered studio space in his workshop—which the two friends still share with four other sculptors today.

“Thrust” was completed in time for the show—after the budding sculptor worked on it almost nonstop for more than 200 hours. His first serious sculpture, it took the form of a projecting wave constructed of small steel plates hinged together with bolts. He knew the technique well, since as an engineer he often visited building sites and took photos of beautiful structural connections. In this application, the sculpture’s sweeping curve could be easily adjusted by tightening or loosening the bolts; these connections are part of the design’s beauty.

Sirvet continued to adapt the technique in varied forms and materials. “Weeping Phoenix of 2004,” now hanging at ADLON, is a graceful, symmetrical canopy rising eight feet. Its 262 polished-aluminum plates are assembled in rows. When the piece was displayed in a gallery in New York, it served an unexpected purpose—a couple was married beneath it.

The sculptor soon moved on to organic forms, still precisely engineered. To shape these jigsaw pieces he used a plasma cutter—an electric torch that slices through metal as sparks fly. The brass, copper or aluminum shapes were then connected with bolts to hardwood or Plexiglas.

In 2008, after working almost full-time as both engineer and sculptor, Sirvet decided to leave engineering. At that time in his art, he recalls, “I started to embrace ‘engineered’ decay.” His pieces became twisted and often riddled with holes, an approach that, he confesses, was obsessive.

It was also successful: Sirvet won the 2009 Award for Excellence in Metal Craft, presented by the James Renwick Alliance at Artomatic, for “Millennia,” which is a perfectly formed, three-foot-wide aluminum bowl exquisitely punctured by thousands of hand-drilled holes.

For the pierced work that has since become a signature style, Sirvet often favors polyethylene, a high-density plastic common in boats. He’s used the material in commissions for U.S. Embassies in Malta and Dubai, and for a screen installed on the terrace of a private home—a massive wall ornamented with 40,001 holes. (He can determine the exact number through AutoCAD, the computer-design program he used in his engineering days).

To fabricate his complex pieces, Sirvet turns to Products Support Inc., a precision manufacturing company whose clients include aerospace and defense contractors. He is in awe of their technical expertise in producing equipment accurate to within a thousandth of an inch.

“I come in and ask them to do fun, crazy things,” says the sculptor. “They tell me, ‘This is hard, and this is easy.’ It’s like when I was a structural engineer and I would figure out how to make a building stand up.” He grins broadly. “Now I’m on the other side.”

Tina Coplan is a writer in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Michael Enn Sirvet’s sculpture is displayed indefinitely at ADLON Design, 1028 33rd Street, NW, 202-337-0810; adlondc.com. For more about Sirvet and his work, visit sirvet.com.

**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

Capturing the Cosmos At a local gathering of The Explorers Club, Washington painter Betsy Stewart chatted with a group of scientists. When they asked how her work was going, she reached for her iPhone and pulled up a photo of her newest painting. Against a midnight-blue background, the image showed brilliant bursts of orange that appeared to drift forward and vanish back into dark obscurity.

“What do you think it is?” Stewart asked the scientists. “Exploding stars in the Andromeda Galaxy,” an astrophysicist imagined. “Cool viruses,” a pathologist suggested. A biologist and physicist also offered their own interpretations.

Stewart was delighted. “You’re all right,” she answered, beaming. Recalling the moment, she explains, “It went exactly as I hoped. It made me realize I was on the right track.”

The “right track” extends the themes that underpin Stewart’s art. Since the 1990s, she has explored nature’s fabric up close and, over the past two years, from an immense distance. On the smooth surface of her paintings, luminous colors and dynamic patterns fluidly converge, expressing nature’s captivating beauty. Yet her work dives deeper. A non-scientist, the artist is fascinated with the workings of the universe. For many years, her paintings have examined the interdependent, microscopic life found in pond water, and by extension our own fragile position—a view that may not be readily apparent.

“I hope when people look at my paintings, they realize that whatever they see represents what cannot be seen by the naked eye without a microscope or telescope,” says Stewart. Her paintings bridge what she calls micro and macro worlds, “exploring the connections in nature from a droplet of water to the vastness of the cosmos.”

The artist’s latest series, “Biocriticals,” considers the ambiguity between those worlds. Stewart started this series after hearing a lecture by NASA scientists. The space-imaging details they showed looked remarkably like the biomorphic forms in her pond paintings. “I began experimenting with the idea that many of the same shapes were out in the solar system as well as in my microscopic water samples,” she says. With her previous water series, “Bioverse,” as a base, Stewart deepened the color palette and set off on an imagined space odyssey. “I found myself thinking, ‘If this were in a different galaxy in outer space, how would it look?’” The success of her journey was confirmed by the Explorers Club experts.

A different kind of odyssey led her to that point. As an undergraduate at American University, Stewart was required to take a painting class. With a background in dance, she was also taking a master class with choreographer Merce Cunningham. “What Merce taught me was that you have to create your own voice,” she recalls.

Later, experimenting with mixed-media collages representing landscapes above and below ground, she suddenly realized, “That’s it! What we can’t see under the earth is what is really important.”

Today, in her combined Kalorama apartment and sunny corner studio, Stewart returns to her own earlier work for inspiration. “I find something in a piece that I really love, a detail that should be blown up and redone,” she says. After stapling a fresh canvas to the wall, she marks out the location of what she calls the main “characters.” As many as 20 transparent layers of acrylic paint are brushed on and smoothed out. When a different perspective is needed, Stewart moves the canvas to the floor. Working intuitively, she may paint over or add pen-and-ink lines and swirls that represent energy.

Stewart travels frequently in the U.S. and abroad. This summer, she will join other artists to exhibit a large collaborative piece at the World Trade Center in Montevideo, Uruguay. Artists in the group, called Take Me to the River, all depict water as a subject in order to bring attention to its critical global importance. Having participated in similar exhibits around the world, Stewart has coached high school students in South Africa and women immigrants in France to make their own art, which is exhibited in the same venue as the professionals’.

While Stewart’s trips may also involve hiking in the Amazon or kayaking in the Adirondacks, they never include sketching distant seas for the next painting. As she says with an impish grin, pointing to the source of her imagination, “It’s all just here.”

Tina Coplan is a freelance writer based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Greg R. Staley is a photographer in Silver Spring, Maryland. Betsy Stewart’s work is permanently exhibited at the Kreeger Museum and in the Washington Convention Center. The next Convention Center art tour is June 5. betsystewart.com

Art Studio: New Dimensions MARCH/APRIIL 2012

A folded 1915 road map might seem an unlikely source of inspiration for bold contemporary artwork. But when Peter Charles was searching for a new direction after creating metal sculpture for 30 years, he turned to that modest possession, recognizing the possibilities of folds in art.

“I was struggling to think what I could do to combine a form and an image, to turn a painting into an object, or an object into a painting,” he says. He thought about folding fans, but the shape was not right. “What else is folded with images?” he pondered—then landed on the map.

“When viewers see something not perfectly flat, it becomes enigmatic,” the artist, who is also a teacher, suggests. “They wonder, ‘Why is this folded? What does it do for the work?’ The added dimension makes it more than a picture.”

Realized over more than a decade, the screens and mixed-media pieces based on that idea unfold in an exhibition of Charles’s work at Cross MacKenzie Gallery in Washington, beginning March 2. Abstract and pictorial, personal and global, his designs explore the intrigue of folds, both real and faux.

In “Tangle,” a tall standing screen, curved ivy tendrils interweave with swirling iPod earbuds, which Charles sees as “a new American icon, like Levis and baseball caps.” The massive painted pattern stands out against the subtle backdrop of light-and-dark panels in an imaginary folded screen. On the back, the trompe l’oeil tableau continues more simply: a single cord hangs from a faux screen inside the actual frame. “I’m always trying to play real against illusion,” the artist says.

“Screens are paintings, but objects at the same time,” he continues, while demonstrating how this form evolved from his mixed-media paintings on folded paper. He pinned a painting to the wall; its accordion folds cascaded down in flexible formation. The heavyweight watercolor paper was mounted on fabric to prevent damage from folding and unfolding, a precaution similar to the silk backing that has preserved his vintage map intact.

A related series brings fixed dimension to the wall. Among these paintings on steel, “Lily Pads” has an octagonal shape extending more than four feet high and wide. Its faceted form is intended to convey, “a stylized idea about ripples on the surface of water moving out to the edges,” the artist says. He hand-cut, formed and welded each section from a flat sheet of steel.

All the pieces in this range of recent work started out the same way: with photos. “Lily Pond” began with images Charles took of a koi pond in his garden. “Buddha,” his newest tall screen, developed from photos of 19th-century Japanese woodblocks and prints. These images were printed, torn and arranged in a composition, then photographed again. Charles continued the process—taking photos of his painting-in-progress and digitally adjusting the layout as he went along.

Earlier in his career, Charles focused on metal and wood sculpture. Tall totemic pieces from that creative period stand huddled like slender spirits in his unheated studio, converted long ago from a three-car garage behind his Northwest Washington home. Wiry, fit and wearing fresh sneakers, he bounds up the studio’s spiral stairs to the mezzanine, pointing out experimental mixed-media works over different stages.

Growing up in Washington, Charles attended the United States Capitol Page School and claims the mantle of “the only Capitol page ever to go to art school.” He majored in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, then switched to sculpture and received a master’s degree in fine art from Yale. He has worked as an artist ever since, continuing to teach studio art first at University of Delaware, then at West Virginia University and since 1983, at Georgetown University.

Glancing across the diverse work produced over four decades, Charles identifies a common thread: a synergism between two and three dimensions.

“That’s been my preoccupation. It takes different forms,” he says. “During the time I was making sculpture, I never considered myself only a sculptor. I always continued to paint or do mixed media or drawing. Everything is integrated that way, always intermixed.”

Tina Coplan is a writer in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Peter Charles’s work can be seen at Cross MacKenzie Gallery from March 2 through April 11 at 2026 R Street, NW, Washington, DC; 202-333-7970; crossmackenzie.com. For more information on the artist, visit petercharlesart.com.

**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

Art Studio: An Ancient Craft JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2012

Thanks to the primal human desire for self-adornment, jewelry is one of the oldest forms of decorative arts. And beads are among the earliest baubles in the beauty arsenal. A necklace found in northern Iraq dating from 5000 BCE includes beads of obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock.

Maggie Meister’s dazzling necklaces, bracelets, cuffs, and collars shake the dust from this storied past. Her classic jewelry, recently seen at the Washington Craft Show, weaves glass and stone beads in patterns that dig into global design origins. Some of her pieces take sculptural form, like earrings based on the rounded tiers of lanterns in a Turkish church. Others incorporate colorful semi-precious and precious stones, pearls and scarabs, embedded or hanging from embellished works of the beader’s art.

Meister creates these resonant designs in the light-filled sun porch of her Norfolk, Virginia, home. But the historic turn to her work, and her jewelry-making career in general, almost didn’t happen.

Back in 1992, Meister was a full-time mom with no background in art. But after admiring a pair of earrings worn by her son’s kindergarten teacher, she set out to learn the craft. Teaching herself many seed-bead techniques, she also took classes and worked at bead stores in San Diego and Seattle, where the family followed her husband’s assignments with Navy Exchange retail stores.

After six years honing her skills, Meister became frustrated by the sense of not having found a style of her own. “I was about to give up beading,” she remembers, when her husband was transferred to Naples, Italy.

After moving with their two boys, her first response was culture shock. “Naples was dirty and overcrowded. It reminded me of living in the Bronx in the 1970s,” she recalls. “I had read Under the Tuscan Sun, and expected I would live in a beautiful villa and take up painting.”

Two months later her outlook changed. She took a tour of the Naples National Archaeological Museum with a guide gifted in presenting history who, she says, “made me really see the city in a new way. Its antiquity captured me. There are so many layers and levels.”

She returned often to the museum, studying archaeological finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum. One bracelet attracted her special attention. “Its little half-globes of granulated gold were connected to make this beautiful bracelet. I stared at it for one hour,” she clearly remembers. “Then I went home and began playing with different size beads to get a very similar effect.”

The bracelet was from Italy’s Etruscan era, which flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries BCE. Its artisans perfected the technique of granulation, in which minute gold spheres are soldered like droplets onto a metal background, typically gold. “Etruscan jewelry is spectacular and was very well known in ancient times,” Meister observes.

Other ancient objects intrigued her.“I loved the mosaics of colored tiles and immediately thought about how they could be translated into beads.” Those design motifs were later adapted in the bold black-and-white shield of her Pelta Necklace, and Solomon’s Knot Bracelet, based on the interlocking pattern of tile borders. Meister’s inspirations know no boundaries. An ancient Indian amulet inspired her exotic Laksmi Pendant with its central stone drop. The puzzle pattern on one of her brooches comes from a Moroccan tile design.

After five years in Naples, Meister returned to the States, but the bead-artist’s heart remained in the land of antiquities. In her studio today, mementos from the journey surround her. Framed beaded fringe from Murano, the glass-blowing center, hangs on the walls, as do mosaic tile fragments and photos of Italian scenes. As Meister describes them, they are “things that when I look up I feel that I’m back there.”

Studied as her designs appear to be, they rarely begin with a sketch or template. She simply starts weaving with waxed nylon cording and a small beading needle in one of four sizes. Small mounds of beads sit ready for use in a tray attached to her work chair.

Meister begins assembling the small seed beads, starting flat and gradually building up small sections. To anchor focal-point pearls or stones in a beaded casing, she starts with rows of flat, circular stitches. The needle then passes through the pearl’s hole, moving back and forth through the beads to form a secure cup. Called bezels, these small components are later stitched together with other beaded sections to complete the designs.

Depending on a piece’s complexity, Meister may use one or several beading techniques: peyote, a versatile stitch popular in ancient Egyptian and Native American beadwork; laddered brick stitch; right-angle weave; and herringbone stitch, as well as a few others. Construction typically takes from one day for the simplest earrings to 60 hours for her most complicated necklaces. The bead artist favors cylindrical-shaped beads for extra texture and the metallic sheen of beads plated in 24-karat gold or sterling silver. For color contrast, she selects emerald, garnet, turquoise, lapis, and carnelian beads, or “almost anything with a hole in it, even if it’s a round shape,” she says. Meister also prefers stones in a raw, unpolished form for an ancient look. And she recently began incorporating vintage beads from her own collection. These very tiny glass beads were used originally on embroidered fabric and in beaded purses.

Teaching beadwork has taken Meister across the U.S and into Germany and Turkey. She also leads tours to Italy with small groups of beaders or artists. “I can’t stay away,” she says.

The years spent in Italy, Meister relates wistfully, “changed our lives.” She explains their ongoing impact on her art: “I tried to capture the essence of the jewelry and mosaic motifs by ancient Roman and Etruscan craftspeople. What I’m doing is creating a memory for me.”

Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. For more information, on the artist, visit maggiemeister.com.

**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

Art Studio - A Dual Career SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

If Dickson Carroll’s exuberant sculptures sometimes resemble buildings, there’s a reason: The sculptor is also a practicing architect. When work priorities permit a perfect balance, Carroll spends mornings in his home office designing wood sculptures or residential projects. In the afternoons, he moves to a basement workshop, turning his sculpture drawings into reality.

Having carved his own ship models as a schoolboy, Carroll considers this dual career natural. “I’ve always worked with my hands,” he says. And after working in both fields for 40 years, he finds they have much in common. “Methods of construction are similar, and architecture in its best incarnation is art.”

Carroll’s winsome, colorful sculptures bring cheer wherever they are installed. In his century-old Cleveland Park home, pieces created throughout his career mingle merrily with sedate antique furnishings. A recent mirrored work, framed in pastel orbs and organic forms, hangs in the living room not far from a sober Victorian portrait depicting an ancestor of his wife, Rives. An early cabinet he designed and built for record albums occupies one corner of the room. In a riot of patchwork colors, the larger-than-life, pointy-headed piece suggests a friendly robot, speakers embedded in its arms.

Several blocks away in a public park on Macomb Street, visitors relax on the stepped base of a neon-hued gazebo that he designed. The tree-form structure rises nearly 40 feet with decorative roof ridges that reach out protectively like sheltering branches or curled exclamation points against a leafy backdrop.

Such figurative interpretations are not intentional, according to the sculptor. “Most people are used to seeing recognizable shapes, which I see just as abstract,” he says. “I’m just drawing a shape.”

Carroll’s architectural models are literal—if hypothetical. Based on real sites, these buoyant and imaginative prototypes enchant, such as his arresting design for a refreshment kiosk on the National Mall inspired by the Smithsonian Castle building and nearby carousel. Or the model for a revised Gallery Place Metro station fitted with vaulted ceiling and drop-down letters spelling out the station’s name. Or a festive new entrance to the Cleveland Park Post Office with flags waving, all in miniature.

“These are functional ideas that are completely fanciful, since they are unlikely ever to be built full-scale,” Carroll says matter-of-factly without any hint of disappointment. “I think of these as sculptures representing an idea—‘what if?’ This is a model of what could be. The idea lives, even if it’s not done.”

Tall and trim with silver hair, Carroll speaks in measured tones and has a formal, almost academic manner that contrasts with his spirited work. He credits modern art as an early influence on his choice of bold primary colors. His admiration for pioneering modern architect Le Corbusier, who designed wood sculpture throughout his life, “gave me permission” to follow a similar path, says Carroll, acknowledging that sculptures represented a minor part of this renowned architect’s work. He had his designs produced by a wood carver in Scotland.

As an undergraduate at Yale, Carroll took studio art classes and received a master’s degree from its School of Architecture in 1966. It came as a jolt when he went to work for an architecture firm specializing in hospitals and institutions. “The creative outlet that you had in school was missing,” he recalls of that period. After three years, Carroll started his own architectural practice. When business was slow, he began making sculpture and has never stopped.

In both fields Carroll favors traditional methods without computer-design assistance. “I find it just as efficient doing sketching, drawing and drafting,” says Carroll, who purposely keeps business simple by working on his own.

Given the complicated compositions of his pieces, many expect a workshop full of sophisticated tools. There too, he says, “I’m low-tech.” His sculptures begin as colored-pencil sketches, which he measures and blows up himself to full-scale drawings. For mirrored works, he traces the drawing onto a sheet of birch plywood, a strong material that won’t split or crack. He uses a hand-held jigsaw to cut out shapes along curves, and a rasp (resembling a kitchen grater with holes) to round edges. Pockets are routed for fitted pieces, which are spaced at different depths to create multiple dimensions. Some are reflected in mirrors, fabricated by a glass company from Carroll’s template. Finally, he glues and brushes each piece with acrylic paint mixed with varnish.

One complex construction completed in his studio extends four-and-a-half feet long and nearly four-feet high. Called "Procession," it is headed for the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, where an earlier work by Carroll—a full-size painted doghouse topped by a decorative turret—resides.

With three architectural projects underway in the Washington area, Carroll spends less time in his workshop. Still, his sculptural vision comes into play on some jobs, including one for a couple he met at a gallery exhibit of his work. “They said they’d love to have a whole house in the style of my art. Seven years later they came and asked me to design their dream house.” That residence in Northwest DC stretches toward the sky with three towers crowned by what Carroll calls “roof décor”—multi-hued, welded-steel weather vanes that move with the wind.

Carroll’s next sculpture, a commission, will merge two of his earlier themes—natural landscapes and mobile constructions moving on strings. He’s considering developing this fusion as a new direction. “The whole idea is not to repeat yourself,” says the 71-year-old sculptor/architect. “Then it’s no fun.”

Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. See more of Dickson Carroll’s work at dicksoncarroll.com. His sculpture is represented in Washington by Addison/Ripley Fine Art; addisonripleyfineart.com; 202-338-5180.

**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

Forces of Nature JULY/AUGUST 2011

In early spring, the hillside in front of Karin Birch's home is a tapestry of emerging plants. Low chartreuse sedum tumbles down the slope like running stitches. Pink blossoms pop up here and there in perky tulips and bowed bleeding hearts. Fresh succulents are mounded like clustered beads. The garden is a work in progress and an inspiration.

"I'm definitely drawn to the landscape in my art. And my fiber work influences how I design gardens,” says Birch. "Both involve thinking about space, color and texture. It's a back-and-forth conversation.” For more than 25 years, she has cultivated the garden while creating fiber work in the studio of her Victorian-era townhouse in Brunswick, Maryland, near Frederick. During the growing season, she also helps others with gardens nearby.

References to the earth surface in her refined fiber works: gentle terrains contoured with natural and personal symbols. A big-picture landscape appears, for example, in the abstract patterns of “Empty Eye.” On one side aqua painted lines curve like a flowing river, while raised beaded areas suggest splashing rivulets. Star-shaped flowers refer, in the artist's world, to hope for the future.

Nature became a force in Birch's artwork in the 1990s, when she backpacked in the wilderness and along the Potomac River near her home. She learned to read topographical maps and visualize levels of land from above, a perspective enhanced in her art. “Creating an illusion of distance, obscuring the actual surface is very intriguing to me,” she says, describing her recent compositions in which “layers wind in and out of each other and overlap, so that it's hard to say which is surface.”

Devising those layers takes considerable time, as Birch constructs each piece entirely by hand. The smallest, measuring eight by 15 inches, requires one week of intense work; the most complex and densely embroidered can take up to two months.

In the studio, Birch starts by stretching raw linen over a wood frame. She quickly brushes thinned paint onto the wet linen, dabbing with a sponge and rags to soak up excess color in a stain-painting effect. Once the frame is secured on a worktable easel, she begins slowly building up the surface with hand embroidery and seed beads sewn on individually.

The artist relishes the combination of these media. “I like the contrast between the spontaneous, watery background and precise, orderly embroidery and beadwork sitting on the surface,” she says. Seldom working out designs in advance on paper, she explains, “I dive in, get going, and solve problems along the way.”

Each step requires her to decide how the next choice relates to all others, as she considers the balance of colors and the interplay of textures and matte and shimmering areas. “It gets tricky, especially further into a piece. There are always unexpected problems," Birch notes.“The choice is to spend a lot of time tearing work out or finding a way out of the problem by coming up with new ideas.” In one case, unable to resolve a design dilemma by stitching, she turned the small piece on its side and added end panels, forming a three-part composition, "Displacement Triptych.”

Throughout, she uses a few basic materials: acrylic paints; threads of cotton, silk or rayon made in France and America; glass seed beads from Czechoslovakia and Japan. After experimenting with a range of techniques over decades, she favors just a few stitches, employed in a process she describes as “drawing with thread.”

Birch trained as a painter, taking courses at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Working on large-scale wall paintings as her two-year-old played underfoot in the studio, she remembers, “I began embroidering to maintain my sanity.” That first piece portrayed an ironing board in fabric appliqué against a jubilant backdrop of buttons and beads. “As soon as I made that piece, I knew I had found my medium,” the artist beams.

Birch had learned stitching as a teenager during summers visiting her grandmother in Minneapolis. While her grandmother knitted she sat nearby, embroidering her jeans with decorative suns, moons and flowers.

Her early art pieces depicted personal narratives of family life. She gradually introduced painting, experimenting until the painting and stitching worked together. Three pieces from her "Wintry Cycle,” small lyrical works from the 1990s, are owned by The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In 2003 Birch received a Maryland State Arts Council individual artist award to support an exhibition of her "Delicious Garden” series, focused on variations in reds and pinks. Successive series explored different color themes. An interest in aqua and yellow intensified in 2002 after the death of her husband from multiple sclerosis, when, she notes, “aqua started to symbolize something to me about loss and hope.”

Her most recent series,“Meaning in Abeyance,” further develops these poetic designs in more complex patterns and contemplative grays and blacks. She compares the images to scenes glimpsed through a garden gate. “It's like looking through something into another world,” she observes, “a source of mystery.”

Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

For more information on Karin Birch's fiber art, contact [email protected], or
Snyderman-Works Galleries in Philadelphia at snyderman-works.com or 215-238-9576.

**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

MARCH/APRIL 2011

An exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum showcases contemporary crafts by four exceptional American artists. This biennial exhibition, opening March 25, recognizes living craft artists whose work deserves to be better known.

Though they were born in decades ranging from the 1940s to the 1970s and work in vastly different styles and media, the artists selected this year share similar foundations. “What’s unique about these artists,” says exhibition curator Nicholas Bell, “is an acute understanding of the traditions in their field and of using that to make something entirely new.” Another shared quality is their painstaking creative processes. “These four people will bend over backwards to make something perfect, and they succeed at a very high rate,” Bell observes. “This is some of the best-made work I have ever seen.”

Matthias Pliessnig, furniture
Furniture maker Matthias Pliessnig picks up a curved-steel scraper and, with great concentration, sweeps it across the entire frame of a bentwood bench under construction. Shaved strips fall like droplets from the undulating wave of this 28-foot-long form filling his studio in Northeast Philadelphia. A second piece, its exact opposite, awaits his attention in an adjoining room. While every step is carefully planned, moving between pieces and determining whether a curve goes one way or another “flips the sides of your brain,” he says with self-aware amusement.

Starting with a computer image and progressing though meticulous stages of building, Pliessnig has worked on this commission for more than four months. He expects to finish it in a few weeks; at that point, he will have assembled a grid of 120 wood-strip lengths and 80 cross ribs at 14,000 intersections. All will be secured with wood dowels glued into 3,000 joints.

When smoothed and sanded, these parts and pieces will coalesce in paired volumes of breathtaking scale, grace and unity. The matched benches, his largest to date, are destined for the lobby of a new science center on New York’s Lower East Side.

Just two years after receiving a master of fine arts degree from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, Pliessnig has staked a claim to a new frontier in studio furniture.

His formative undergraduate furniture design studies at the Rhode Island School of Design encouraged him to think about unconventional ways to work with wood. “Furniture,” he says, “was the vehicle for what I wanted to do: to bridge the lines between sculpture, design and craft.”

He discovered by chance the technique that has become his trademark. During the summer of 2006, after his first year of graduate school, Pliessnig was experimenting in the woodshop when an engineering student walked in and asked him to cut strips for a boat he wanted to build. The woodworker, who loves boats, obliged. “It was the first time I had ever used steam to bend wood and used the bent wood to create a structure,” he recalls, remembering also his excitement at developing a structural form that “serves a purpose and is inherently beautiful. I was hell-bent on trying to push that as far as I could.”

In his final two years of school, Pliessnig made 23 pieces, perfecting the bentwood process not covered in textbooks. His arduous technique starts with a computer model, using the industrial-design program Rhinoceros. Its line drawings help him visualize the three-dimensional form in space. It also provides dimensions for the first step: building curved plywood stations, molds over which he will position the bent wood.

Once construction begins, he tosses aside computer aids, adapting and adjusting the form to reality. “I tweak the model or move stations around to make it more dynamic,” he explains. “With the computer, you can’t relate your body to it. Even looking at your hand next to a piece makes you see it differently.”

Pliessnig prefers white oak. Lightweight but extremely hard, it bends easily. From flat boards he cuts strips about one-inch wide, one-quarter inch thick, and eight to ten feet long. Each piece, clamped into place, is left to dry overnight, then glued into position. At the end, the entire form is hand-sanded to remove rough edges, then hand-finished. For his recent commission, that process is expected to take two weeks and two people.

So far Pliessnig’s work has explored variations only on seating. He is intrigued with the design challenge of developing a bentwood object’s form and structure, while accommodating the human body’s weight and shape—what he calls “a live load, a dynamic mode.” Following in this bentwood tradition, Pliessnig tackles increasingly complex feats of design and engineering—all inspired by building a boat. “It’s about two curves in space becoming a form,” he says simply.

Cliff Lee, porcelain
Potter Cliff Lee looks out his studio window across acres of cornfields reaching to the horizon. “I like the solitude of working in my studio,” he says. “Time goes so fast.”

In fact, time seems to dissolve in this converted 200-year-old stone barn in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Here, Lee has been exploring the legendary art of Chinese porcelain since 1992. His elegant teardrop vases and exquisitely carved lotus and peach-blossom sculptures bring into focus the distant horizon of decorative wares that were prized by emperors, kings and their consorts. Among the few American studio potters working in porcelain, the Renwick’s exhibition catalog notes, Lee “stands alone in his sensitivity to the source and the intensity with which he channels China’s ceramic past into contemporary American work.”

Lee’s art goes back to the earth, as he mixes his own porcelain from kaolin, feldspar and silica. The recipe for this pure white, translucent ceramic body originated in China a millennium ago. It was a coveted secret, only discovered in the West in 1709.

Today, Lee has rediscovered monochromatic glaze formulas rivaling those of Chinese courts. His lustrous Imperial yellow—revealed after 17 years of trials—metallic oil-spot, opalescent oxblood, fine-lined crackle and jade-like celadon enrich the surfaces of his pure, sculpted pieces. An innovative lava glaze suggests dimensional moon rock or the sea’s foam surface.

Hundreds of natural chemicals such as copper, cobalt, manganese and iron are refined through Lee’s art. “Some ingredients come as rock and I pulverize them,” he says. “It is so difficult, but chemistry comes very natural to me.”

Once a practicing neurosurgeon, Lee took pottery classes at James Madison University to relieve the stress of his job—and a new career was born. He began investigating his own heritage; while growing up in Taiwan, the son of a diplomat, he had spent many hours at the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

In the time-honored manner, Lee turns his forms on a potter’s wheel. Once dry, pieces are high-fired in a massive brick kiln. About 50 percent are lost through breakage or because they “don’t turn out the way I want in firing,” Lee says. “Sometimes I lose a whole kiln load that I’ve worked on from three to six months.”

Yet he perseveres. “You have to research, study and experiment,” says the tireless potter, whose work can be seen in the White House Collection of American Crafts and in numerous museums. “It’s back to the ancients,” he says. “I don’t cut corners.”

Ubaldo Vitali, silver
The first important object created by master silversmith Ubaldo Vitali was a 22-karat-gold pen made in his father’s workshop. Pope John XXIII used the pen to sign his 1963 encyclical letter on establishing universal peace. “I felt like I had a little hand in the peace process,” says Vitali, a fourth-generation silversmith born and educated in Rome.

In the 50 years since, Vitali has masterfully created presentation pieces for three popes, Queen Elizabeth II and three U.S. presidents. He has executed or designed collections for Tiffany, Movado, Cartier and Bulgari (a connection that goes back three generations in the Vitali and Bulgari families). He has restored historical silver and gold objects dating from fourth century BC through modern times for auction houses, private collectors and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the government body overseeing all museums in Italy.

He also designs his own sinuous, sleek contemporary art, distilling a far-ranging knowledge of techniques and styles in precious metals. In the exhibition catalog, Ulysses Dietz, senior curator of decorative arts at the Newark Museum, calls him “arguably the greatest living silversmith in the United States.”

Vitali arrived in New Jersey in 1967 to join his future wife, Anita. They met while both were students—he in sculpture, she in painting—at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. He studied other disciplines as well, convinced that in his future field, “you have to think as an architect, a sculptor and painter.”
For more than 30 years, a 3,500-square-foot studio in Maplewood, New Jersey, has served as Vitali’s combined workshop and laboratory. Two longstanding assistants work beside him, surrounded by hundreds of handmade tools. Depending on the object to be conserved, techniques from antiquity through the latest scientific technologies are applied. The goal in conservation, Vitali says, is “maintaining structural and aesthetic integrity. We don’t try to make it look new.”

His personal designs—whether a centerpiece in the Yale University Art Gallery, a soup tureen in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, or commissioned trophies—take a separate trajectory. “Silver is a form of kinetic art,” he finds. “As you move, the object and its reflection change. It has to make a statement in space.”

The versatile silversmith embraces these complementary specialties. As he tells it, “When you do conservation, everything is controlled. You become the person who did it 200 or 300 years ago. He is the master.” He reflects, “Modern work is freedom. Love is surrendering as well. They’re different.”

Judith Schaechter, stained glass
In the Middle Ages, stained-glass windows inspired awe and wonder in a dreary world. Humble peasants, slogging across dirt roads to enter a church, raised their eyes toward heaven, encountering brilliantly colored windows.

“They didn’t see pictures, they didn’t see glass. It was state-of-the-art special effects, like Avatar is for us today,” says contemporary stained-glass artist Judith Schaechter.

Schaechter relates with a heavy heart and touch of humor how the appeal of stained glass as an avant-garde medium has “suffered many deaths” across the centuries, losing ground to new fashions and technologies such as photography, video and the Internet. In art circles today, she notes,
“Stained glass is not trendy, to say the least.”

Yet Schaechter proudly views her artistic medium as part of an honored continuum. Her work evokes that tradition in its spiritual themes, radiant beauty and decorative pattern, while introducing an unflinching contemporary bite. In bold compositions, tearful ashen figures run dreamlike or languish in agony, skulls are piled high and angels teeter. These subjects, she believes, are no more tragic than depictions of saints in an earlier era.

“I understand that others may find the themes depressing. But I’m not wallowing in it. It’s all about getting over it,” Schaechter says matter-of-factly. Historically, she points out, window narratives concerned “transcending pain, transcending one’s circumstances. You can’t talk about people’s souls in transition without talking about where they’re coming from,” she notes. Her art is owned by private collectors and museums in America and Europe, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

At the studio in her Victorian row house in South Philadelphia, Schaechter pushes the technical limits of stained glass. Before firing, stacks of colored glass are sandblasted, engraved and partially painted black. The process is repeated for each separate piece, all soldered together with copper foil. A completed panel, on average about 30 by 40 inches, involves several dozen to possibly hundreds of pieces of glass, and several months of work.

Schaechter constantly changes working methods, modifying as she goes along. The one constant is her own perfectionism. “I have really sort of insanely high standards,” she says. “I don’t know what it is I’m looking for, but I know what it is when I see it.”

Writer Tina Coplan resides in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

“History in the Making: Renwick Craft Invitational 2011” runs March 25 through July 31, 2011, at the Renwick Gallery, 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC; 202-633-7970; americanart.si.edu. More information about featured artists is available at the following sources: Cliff Lee: 717-733-9373; cliffleeporcelain.com. Matthias Pliessnig: 401-855-3304; matthias-studio.com. Judith Schaechter through Claire Oliver Gallery: 212-929-5949; judithschaechter.com. Ubaldo Vitali: 973-763-9310; [email protected]

**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

Art Studio- The Gilded Age JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011

Walking into The Jefferson, a venerable hotel on Washington’s 16th Street, is like embarking on a luxury cruise back in time. Exquisite Beaux Arts architecture transports the visitor to a courtly age. And decking the walls, gilt-framed art opens some 1,000 views onto the past.

That’s the number of paintings, prints and other wall objects that Evelyn Avery’s studio framed, restored, reproduced or created from scratch as part of the hotel’s recent renovations. These historic and newly minted pieces arrived in truckloads from Avery’s workshop in Atlanta, Georgia. A longstanding resource for interior designers and clients in the Washington area, Avery moved her studio to Alexandria, Virginia, last summer.

“After 20 years of working here, the business was so strong it seemed a natural transition when our lease expired in Atlanta,” she says.

During the hotel’s three-year restoration, Avery worked closely with William McGovern of McGovern Design Studio, who was then a lead interior designer at Forrest Perkins, a design firm that specializes in luxury landmark hotels. Implementing McGovern’s vision, she provided many art pieces based on themes related to Thomas Jefferson’s life and times and also devised ways to present a wide range of new and existing works.

During the project, her studio framed a group of Jeffersonian documents in classical styles, cleaned a darkened nautical painting and restored its now gleaming frame, and reproduced a circular, convex, girandole mirror. Her artisans built media cabinets with mirrored folding panels to hide TVs in luxury guest suites. And they created the largest gilded work in Avery Studios’ history: an eight-by-11-foot frame surrounding two majestic, 19th-century landscape paintings. This elegant combination forms a scenic, glittering backdrop against a charcoal wall in the hotel’s reception area.

Petite and perfectly groomed, Evelyn Avery exudes energy and determination. She speaks in a fast-paced Southern lilt, which she describes laughingly as “a blend of North and South Carolina with a lot of drama.” On a recent afternoon, she gave a spirited tour of the new Avery Studios.

At the entrance, a public showroom displays dazzling frame options, from iridescent abalone shell and antiqued metal leaf, to faux bird’s eye maple, brilliant polka dots, gilded stars and painted stripes. “This is only a sample of what we can do,” emphasizes Avery. “All finishes can be mixed and matched. We’re not tied to an inventory of stock moldings. What I started out to do was serve the designer. I will do one thing, one time, one way.”

Miles of linear feet of wood moldings designed by the studio are stored along the workshop’s back wall. At one worktable, a carpenter finishes sanding a poplar frame covered in gesso, a chalk undercoat that bonds to the wood and provides a smooth surface. He carefully inspects the piece for any scratches, gouges or ripples. “Seventy percent of the work happens before a frame gets to the gilding or painting department,” Avery points out. “Beauty is in the prep.”

Another carpenter enters a spraying booth, slips on a respirator for protection and sprays a frame with a primer coat, as an exhaust fan draws out particles that might fall on the frame. This modern step contrasts with the centuries-old techniques that prevail in the studio.

In a separate area, a gilder restores a damaged antique frame. Working on its inner lip, he replaces drab gold paint with more reflective and refined gold-metal leaf. Across the room, faux tortoiseshell frames are drying. They were painted with several coats of tinted shellac, a natural resin secreted by the female lac bug. Achieving the desired effect, explains finisher Tony Laseur, “depends on holding the brush a certain way and controlling temperature and air flow in the room. The material has a life of its own.”

Avery Studios now has six employees. Only one, production manager Ellen Barber-Rackley, made the move from Atlanta. With a master’s degree in museum studies from the University of Leicester in England, she worked as a painting conservator before joining the studio 18 years ago. Barber-Rackley, who fills in on all jobs when needed, says, “It’s very rewarding to start with an idea or a drawing and see it finished as a one-of-a-kind frame that works with a painting or other original art.”

Two veteran artisans from the Atlanta studio spent 60 days in Alexandria training new employees. Skills passed on endure in jobs finished or underway. Recent projects include small desk stands made to house former Senator Bill Frist’s Civil War documents in an archival manner at his private library in Tennessee, and a series of modern, black-lacquered frames to showcase scenic photographs of Washington, DC, for team owners at the Verizon Center.

Around the workshop, a small reproduction plaster intaglio carved image depicting a classical theme leans against the rubber mold in which it was cast. The mold was taken from an original ceramic intaglio, one of many bought as souvenirs by generations of travelers on the Grand Tour. Artisans at the studio use a similar casting technique to reproduce ornaments from antique frames that Avery collects on travels in France.

A growing cadre of local designers relies on Avery for art acquisition and custom creations, from frames to furniture. Interior designer Barry Dixon says he has not installed a job in years without at least a few pieces by Avery Studios. “These custom bespoke frames are made the Old World way,” he says. “Evelyn is pretty amazing at what she can do and the gamut of possibilities she brings to the table. The truth is she can do anything you can think of.”

Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Michael Ventura is a photographer in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Avery Studios is located at 100 South Early Street, Alexandria. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and Saturdays by appointment. For more information, call 703-823-3935 or visit averyart.com.

For a tour of Evelyn Avery's chic DC penthouse click here.

**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.

A 3-DIMENSIONAL KINGDOM SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010

What happens after an artist devotes two years to working on exhibitions that come to an end? For John Dreyfuss, sculptor of elegant iconic forms, it means returning to push the limits of those forms, and relearning how to work in the studio eight hours a day. For any artist, that would seem like an assignment in paradise; Dreyfuss’s studio is unlike any other.

Housed in a nearly block-long, 18th-century building on the edge of Georgetown, the vast space occupies a hillside above the Potomac River. Grand stairs lead to the 60-foot-wide underground studio, straddling heaven and earth. Light washes over Dreyfuss’s three-dimensional kingdom: Working models of larger-than-life lions command attention between towering columns. Oversized vases, statuesque implements, a massive bone form line up like colossal chess pieces, poised to move.

“The monumental scale of the studio is so perfect for what I do,” Dreyfuss reflects with gratitude and wonder. “Just to be in a space like this is such a gift, to have the ability to step back and see the work at different sizes. My work has evolved because of this luxury of space.”

In harmony with the building’s timeless classical architecture, Dreyfuss’s work distills epochs of art history. His animal forms reference images ranging from ancient Egyptian to renderings by Michelangelo and Picasso. The graceful curves of musical instruments painted on Greek vases are revived in his lyre sculptures. Stone Age tools have served along with sleek, stealthy submarines as touchstones in the artist’s 30-year quest, as he says, “to make beautiful objects in shapes that move me.”

Dreyfuss’s sculptures have become landmarks in a city of monuments. His 14-foot bronze “Solomon’s Gates” frames the entrance to the James Monroe Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Life-size baseball players take permanent positions in his “Full Count” sculpture at the Federal Reserve building gardens on Virginia Avenue. Dreyfuss’s official Key to the Federal City of Washington, DC, created in 2002 for former Mayor Anthony Williams, led to more recent requests from Presidents Clinton and Obama for lyre and dove sculptures, to be presented as Presidential gifts.

A 22-foot-long vertebrae form remains an enduring relic from the sculptor’s exhibition at American University Museum’s Katzen Arts Center last year. Director Jack Rasmussen describes how Dreyfuss’s six white pieces transformed the austere concrete sculpture garden. “The space became charged like I’ve never seen it before, as if you were witnessing some Cycladian ritual with shapes pared down to the bare essentials,” he says, adding after a pause, “We kept waiting for the sun to set to reveal where the lost ark was buried.”

Dreyfuss received an architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 before attending Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to study sculpture. His architecture skills helped in restoring Halcyon House, the massive historic property where he works and lives. Dreyfuss compares this 17-year-construction odyssey—“slowly stripping away something to the armature, then slowly rebuilding from the ground up”—with the painstaking process of making sculpture.

He begins each new piece with pencil sketches followed by more formal drawings. Retreating to a cave-like niche in the grand studio, he builds an aluminum armature to support the small-scale maquette. After inserting a modeling tool into a cauldron of melted wax, he applies the wax slowly in layers as the 12-inch form takes shape.

That size is optimal for scanning and mapping onto computer equipment stretching along the studio's mezzanine. Computer-generated images can be manipulated, rotated and viewed from any angle, as well as reduced or enlarged to any scale. One machine feeds white plastic through a heating nozzle to produce a 12-inch prototype.

“Plastic is the modern plaster,” says the sculptor, who is no longer covered in plaster dust as in his earlier studio days. “The 19th-century process of plaster masters making molds and castings has so easily adapted itself to computer modeling.” He adds, “Seeing the work in three dimensions and in a scale appropriate for the job makes refining those shapes so much easier. Most important, the hand of the artist is not lost.”

Once a final print and model are approved, information is sent by disk to a fabricator, where the piece is carved in reinforced fiberglass. It may proceed to a foundry for casting in metal—iron, stainless steel, aluminum or bronze. Dreyfuss limits editions to 12 of each sculpture.

He often leaves noncommissioned works in fiberglass with an epoxy finish. “They’re lighter in weight and suited to the outdoors, as in boats,” he points out, standing in his studio near two white abstractions, remaining like totems from the Katzen show.

Income from Halcyon House’s six apartments and public space rented for corporate and private events allows Dreyfuss rare independence to pursue his artistic direction. In addition, serendipity struck at one party, when Dreyfuss met Richard Bott of Lockheed Martin. A mutually beneficial alliance developed that became the sculptor’s bridge to computer-assisted production.

“Their engineers taught me how not to be trapped by traditional methods of making sculpture, how to use new ways to refine shapes and to make pieces quicker,” he says. “And they were happy to work on something that wasn’t a weapon.”

The partnership led Dreyfuss to his “Enigma” show at Hemphill Fine Arts last year. Munitions engineers provided technological assistance. At the same time, the relationship between artist and armaments manufacturers navigated deeper waters in the series Dreyfuss calls “submersibles.” These streamlined, flawlessly finished forms relate to the ambiguous beauty and power of military weapons. Back in his studio, the sculptor points to one of his recent wax models, the elongated body of a seal. He compares its shape to that of a submarine.

Dreyfuss muses on the next stage of his sculptural journey, perhaps returning to animal portraits, the point where he began. His first works, a polished bronze rooster and bull’s head, greet guests in the mansion’s entrance hall. “Each piece teaches you something,” the sculptor observes with characteristic deliberation. “I’m always thinking how a new piece fits into the larger body of work. Nothing is capricious.”

Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

John Dreyfuss is represented by Hemphill Fine Arts at 1515 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC; 202-234-5601; www.hemphillfinearts.com.

A 3-Dimensional Kingdom SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010