Born and raised in the heart of New England, furniture designer David Rasmussen has forged westward with his eponymous furniture studio, bringing his background in heirloom-quality carpentry and fabrication to Colorado. Rasmussen synthesizes influences as diverse as Danish, Ming Dynasty and contemporary American studio furniture.
His entire portfolio, from tree houses to art panels, is worth a look, but a couple of his tables caught my eye:
The "Artichoke" is a table that has been painted to look like its namesake.
The Artichoke table was designed to represent an organic form that has been split to reveal its core, in this case the cross section of an artichoke. The body of the table is made from shop-molded plywood faced with exceptional zebra wood veneer and coopered to form the elliptical shell. Cocobolo legs are mortised into the shell to make this table heirloom quality. Artist Scott Harris skillfully executed the acrylic painting on the top of the table. The painting has been sanded flat and treated to act as a durable tabletop.
The overall effect is distinctly biological, not least for its floral hues, while the drum-like form also evokes a melon despite its concentric trompe l'oeil core. (There's also a red cabbage version
The "Lego" table, a collaboration with Amee Hinkely, is essentially an abstracted version of the "Artichoke," intended to resemble the "polished core [of] a geode," though the concentric colors also evoke a polychromatic vegetable cross-section. The surface is best described as an inverted, elongated geodesic dome, making for an uncanny juxtaposition of order and chaos. However, the repurposed school chair legs strike me as a bit out of place, short of detracting from the piece as a whole.
