Boy with Red Bird
Beth Ozarow

Craft philosopher Paulus Berenson wrote, “You can magnetically attract soul by making her a fabulous nest.”

It seems to me that this is what we are all trying to do: Create a home that will attract soul. The more impersonal, cold, and sterile the urban environment becomes, the more important it is to find warmth and personal expression on the inside. Today, the surge of interest in the handcrafted signals an urgent need in the interiors we inhabit.

A growing number of Americans have discovered the unmatched pleasures of buying, owning, using, and displaying the work of artists. At the same time, more and more of my overworked, stressed-out friends are pursuing their own forms of creativity – cooking imaginative recipes, making furniture in their basements, or knitting glorious sweaters.

We intuitively turn to traditions of creating as a means to counter the enormous weight of all that is manufactured and packaged in our lives. Art is creative resistance – the equivalent of making our own hamburgers to spite McDonald’s!

My Friend’s Friend
Dean Pulver
Photo by Pat Pollard

Chairs are the most intimate of objects. They support our bodies and express our personalities. The chair focuses our associations with the natural and the domestic, speaking concisely and elegantly of life and how it is lived.

The Guild represents a number of furniture makers who create chairs, and a quick survey of these chairs determines that every one of them displays the thoughtfulness and eloquence of the maker. But recently, we added this chair by New Mexico artist Dean Pulver, and I thought, once again, that a furniture maker has succeeded in creating an exciting new aesthetic with this timeless object.

Or, should I say, an exciting old/new aesthetic. Because Pulver’s design recalls distant drums and beckons one to sit close to the earth in its low seat. Last year, Pulver told me that he felt as if he was moving backwards, so to speak, as he was using fewer power tools – all because hand-tooling helped him better express his ideas in his work.

Dean Pulver’s chair has become a metaphor for life and art, taking advantage of the object’s potential for moving beyond functionality.