Thank you very much.
A few years ago I went to Italy for the wedding of a former girlfriend. Her family has had a home outside of Firenze for decades. One of the main tenets my parents instilled in their kids was the idea that we should be different from everybody else so I didn’t want to go to the wedding wearing a dark suit like everybody else. I found an artist that worked in fabric and she made a custom kimono type jacket with a beautiful back panel as well as a shirt I designed. Alas, an entire family of Africans dressed in exquisite traditional garb were at the wedding and made my coat look fairly banal.
I had a very large BBQ this summer and invited the seamstress to it and since I live in a converted warehouse it houses both the photo studio as well as the woodshop.
I’m going to tie this all together, I promise.
A few days after the BBQ she emailed me asking if I could build this cabinet along with a table for her. She wanted it to feel asian-y and she gave the dimensions. She lives up in the hills, overlooking the San Francisco Bay where the fog is often below her place. So I came up with the design where the bottom doors represents the fog below and the inlays are the cherry blossoms above. The stout legs, thicker at the bottom and tapering smaller as they go up are tree trunks. The bottom of the legs are the roots where portions are above ground.
And now to tie it together. This older piece is a pure conceptual thing I did for the former girlfriend that led me to hire the seamstress. The second picture is with all the boxes removed. The door in the middle houses a Japanese ink set, the rock in the picture 3 I routed so you can grind the ink in the rectangle


