Welcome to Medullary Ray

What is successful Design in furniture? Successful design is functional and visually pleasing. The challenge is to arrive at a design that meets both of these qualities equally. I believe woodworking is very much like the martial arts.  It is discipline and focus and being in tune with your senses, your feelings and the material that you are working with. Sometimes we just know we should wait to make that cut or start that glue-up and other times we know that everything is in alignment and there is no time to waste. It is a very personal process. Design is much the same. We struggle with the radius of an arc, the heaviness of a line, the proportions of a cabinet all related to the wood we are using and perhaps the final placement of the piece. Design is exciting! It can be a lot of fun to design your next desk or chair or armoire. Even more exciting to choose the wood. What woodworker doesn't like to go look at your local hardwood supplier and see what they mi...

                                                                                                 What's a Product POP ? We built the black metal tünr Tower  for  UBIQ  but it wasn't showing the public clearly enough that this is new product . The Tower is like a shoe tree, it displays a shoe out on the floor, away from a wall. In this case we were displaying six shoes fully dressed with the new sock and lace. This store wanted the Tower because they were concerned about shrinkage  (product theft). It wasn't working to sell the tünr products! So UBIQ decided to have the product out on the floor and this display is the result. It is basically the same pop display that is in DTLR , PHLI , Atmos , and  Concepts . I chose...

 The Madagascar Black Laminate Tower was designed specifically for UBIQ on Walnut Street, downtown Philly.  Check out UBIQ! .   Stay tuned for the latest UBIQ version of the Product POP.

Here we are in the shop with the first of the Product POP's completed. The stacks of shelving for the remaining pop's are in the background! The rods and shelf dividers are all hand cut and sandblasted giving them a glittery look. The 20 units I built are all out the door, in their prospective shops in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Georgia, Road Island, Maryland and more . . .

PHLI in Chicago has the new tünr product and display! This is the first in a store, loaded and ready to go.  click here to visit PHLI One of the first six premium socks and laces for iconic styles from iconic brands.

Here's my  tünr  dresser (you may read more about this in a previous post and on my flickr page  http://www.flickr.com/photos/perfect45degree/ ) and next to it (for sizing) is my newest POP just assembled   today. I call this one  The Madagascar tünr Tower . It's very exciting to finally see one go together. I have been making four of these which means many parts that need precision cutting filing and sanding. I am still waiting on the signs to come back from the laser shop but it should be here soon. The Madagascar laminate, which is the black vertical posts, has a high gloss and a smooth finish which reflects the image of the shelves creating a translucent effect. It's very interesting to look at if you notice all of the information that is being mirrored back at you. The shelves have a texture to them and the laminate appears indestructible. What I didn't expect is the texture reflection in the Madagascar. It's like a little visual surprise when you ...

Self portrait Life size, profile view private collection I view sculpture and furniture very similarly. Shapes intersecting, overlapping, and carrying the line for and with one another. It is my hope that the eye is taken on a journey, finding the story of the piece. This is one of my favorite sculptures to date. It is the result of the convergence of many factors in my life. I had been self-saturated with African art for many years and I was studying art at a time when the curriculum focused on the changes that had occurred in art since “The Academy”. I’m talking about the early 20 th century with Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism etc. We studied realism, extensively. This head, in fact, was sculpted as a realistic head.   I had been doing realistic sculptures since 9 th grade and I was quite good at it. After a while, I found it to be boring. So what if I could make something look exactly like something else? I didn’t feel any satisfaction from capturing a ...