Craftsman Furniture

Rockland craftsman honored for fine furniture making — Living ...

Reid is a member of the New Hampshire Furniture Masters , a group of 25 furniture makers whose goal is to preserve and extend New England’s tradition of fine furniture making. In addition to creating high-end furniture, he teaches a 12-week intensive course for beginning furniture makers at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport. Reid, influenced by both ancient and modern furniture designs, creates detailed, high-end furniture with an emphasis on pattern. The pieces are influenced by a variety of furniture designs, from a stool recovered from King Tut’s tomb to mid-century modern furniture. The oldest craft organization in America, the Society of Arts & Crafts , has honored Rockland furniture maker Brian Reid with their 2012 Artist Award. The Boston show includes five pieces of Reid’s furniture — a jewelry cabinet, a pair of stella tables, a tartan console, a blanket chest and a three-panel screen room divider. Reid’s work will be shown in the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship faculty show this summer and at the Gallery at Frenchman Bay in Somesville. “For people who have a lot of money, paying $12,000 for a piece of furniture isn’t a big deal,” he said. Early in life, Reid worked as a mechanical engineer and began building furniture as a hobby. At age 30, he decided to pursue the craft in earnest and traveled overseas to study furniture making under renowned designer John Makepeace at Parnham College in Dorset in the United Kingdom. “I’m the fifth or sixth furniture maker to get the award in 20 years. I make functional furniture. I like simple, junky furniture that I can live with and throw around. “My furniture does reflect my personality, but I have a conceptual understanding of my pieces. Reid is one of the three artists who received this biennial award, and his work will be shown in an exhibition through June 30 at the Society of Arts & Crafts gallery at 175 Newbury St. in Boston. Many of his chairs, tables, chests and beds — priced from $4,000 to $18,000 — are more like three-dimensional geometric compositions, covered in tiny squares and triangles. “For me, I’m a craftsman. Reid’s “Hourglass,” a platform bed featuring 9,440 parquetry veneers, was commissioned for “Finding Balance,” an exhibition curated by artist James Surls for the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. “My work is not that traditional, so it does much better in an urban environment,” Reid said. Along with the free 10-week show, Reid received a cash award of $3,000. This quilt, made of 6,500 triangles, became the canopy of “Hourglass,” which is covered with more than 10,000 wood triangles. “That bed came about when I was just getting into doing this patterning stuff,” Reid said. Comments should be your own work, not copied and pasted from elsewhere, though brief quoted passages to make your point are fine. I always tell people, and they always kind of find it funny, what I prefer to live with and what I prefer to make are two different things. Reid, originally from Seattle, left an artist residency in Colorado to move to Maine with his wife, Monica Chau, six years ago. “This was a real feather in my cap, so to speak,” Reid said. “A friend of mine gave me a book on quilting and it made me realize what I was doing, in a way, is much like quilting. Soon after, Reid purchased an antique quilt from the Depression era. I don’t consider myself an artist,” he said. That nasty line that makes your buddies go "haw, haw".