Work for Niki de St. Phalle

For seven years I had the incredible opportunity to build, first furniture and then artwork for the late French artist, Niki de St Phalle. Many of Niki’s works are of large playful figures and she has done several outdoor sculpture gardens including the Tarot Garden in Italy and the Queen Califia’s Magic circle in Escondido. Niki had never used wood in her work but was very enthusiastic about using a new material. Some of the first pieces that I produced were wooden cores to be painted or covered with other materials, but latter Niki wanted to see the grain and figure of the wood.  She also wanted to have the piece in bright colors, typical to her style. We used transparent dyes to achieve this. Most of the time the pieces that she wanted to do were not in the normal scope of what is done in wood.  This includes both structure and finishing. I found myself constantly saying,” let me think about this and see if I can figure a way to build the piece or make the wood do that and still be strong”. The snake chairs took months to engineer the structure, joints and shape so the chair would be strong, reliable, but also comfortable and have the sculptured form and style that was Niki.

Snake and Bird Chair Dining Room

These are some of the snake chairs and bird chairs that were built for Niki and are shown around her dinning room table. The Bird chairs are built up in what is called stacked lamination. They have mortise and tendon joints where the “stacks” change direction (at the legs, tail and seat and body). The snake chairs are laminated and glued using epoxy and 1/4” thick wood sections. They are bent over a huge jig using over 150 champs to get the wood to go where it needed to. Both chairs are dyed for color, finished and have glass, jewels and Italian millaflore medallions inserted in mastic to allow for expansion.

Bird Chair

This is one of the bird chairs and you can see the different layers of wood glued up. The wood is African mahogany, an orange color, but after final sanding, the wood is then bleached white so it can show the dye color as bright as possible. The beak on this chair is gilded in gold leaf. 20”x22”x68”

Niki and Del

This was the first batch of snake chairs I produced. These were donated by niki and sent to Basil Switzerland to be part of the restaurant in the new Jean Tinguely Museum. 27”x27”x53”

Large Snake Chair

These chairs started when Niki asked me to re-explore an earlier work of hers. The original chair was in fiberglass, but Niki wanted to see what it would look like in wood. The first chair was in teak and was left unfinished as we were seeing if it would hold up outdoors. It was originally intended to be in the Escondido Queen Califia Garden. The latter ones were all mahogany and dyed like this one. Niki donated two of these and they are on display and the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park. 40”x48”x73” (Go to Links page to go to Mingei Museum).

Snake Mirror

Like the large snake chair, this was from and earlier work of Niki that she wanted to try in wood. Dave Carr, another woodworker and myself made a series of these mirrors, some were painted and others were dyed bright colors. Another artist Pierre Marie in France made the Millaflore medallions. 6”x35”x22”

Macate Noah's Art

This is two different set of maquettes made for the Noah’s ark sculpture park in Jerusalem. Mario Botta of Switzerland was building the ark and Niki was making the animals. Rather that the classic version of loading of the ark, Niki wanted to show the ark the moment after landing and all of the animals being released. The smaller set in the rear are all in natural wood and were used to layout the arrangements of the animals on a model of the ark. The larger ones were carved and then the artist Tim Herr, who worked for Niki, painted all of the individual stones and glass on them. Small-2’’x2’’x2”

Large 5”x5”x5”

Lion Maquette

This is a close up of one of the painted maquettes from Noah’s Art Sculpture garden in Jerusalem. 4”x6”x2.5”

Work in Shop

This is some of the Maguettes, a large snake chair, and patterns used for the chairs.