Constructing Art: Catching the Viewer’s Eye

This octagonal Center Table is thought to be the work of Thomas Day, a celebrated African American cabinetmaker. He owned one of the most successful furniture manufactories in the South in the years before the Civil War. Day was born in 1801 in Dinwiddie, Virginia, to free African American parents. He was well educated, attending school with white students in Sussex County. After learning carpentry skills from his father, he moved to Milton, North Carolina. By 1850, his shop had become the state’s largest cabinetmaking firm. Day’s mostly white clientele included wealthy planters, businessmen, and politicians from several states. 

This example was made by using a plastic container lid as guide to draw two circles on brown construction paper. A third circle of the same size was drawn on a piece of cardstock. 

The three pieces were glued together with a glue stick. The cardstock was sandwiched between the brown circles to make the top sturdier. 

(A small paper plate also makes a great miniature table top.) 

You might also use this as an opportunity to practice drawing circles with a drawing compass.

Decide how you would like the top of your miniature table to be decorated and draw, glue, or attach the decorations. 

In this example, a gold-colored jar top was chosen as the base for the table, so gold decorations were chosen for the table top. 

The little gold triangles were cut from scraps of gold ribbon. (Hint: Use extra strong glue sticks for metallic decorations.)

Set aside your table top to let the glue dry and decide what color you would like the central post to be. 

Measure out a rectangular piece (about 2–3 inches in height and 5–6 inches in width).

Curl the paper strip into a column with a diameter that will fit nicely on top of the small container top that you’ve chosen for the base. Once the glue is dry, decorate the column in a way that goes well with the table top.

Your sketches, doodles, and drawing experiments are a great source of ideas.

Remember that it’s ok to have some design failures along the way! Just keep a record of what works and what doesn’t work to build up your understanding of materials! 

For example, when the first attempt at a brown table top (pictured here) was made, it was attached to a clear plastic top with bottled glue. 

Not only did the wet glue make the construction paper buckle, but the dry glue popped off of the clear plastic top! 

It’s also a good idea to keep the leftover elements that you decided not to use. An octagonal table top was originally planned as an alternate top for the first table, but the final design called for gold and brown. 

The octagonal table top became a miniature floor rug in a later design challenge.

What’s in your closet, drawer, or cupboard?

Ask your parents or teacher to help you locate safe objects for this project! You might use cardboard or pasteboard boxes, paper, magazines, etc. 

Investigate your materials. Think about construction.

How were the boxes put together?

What shape do you want to make? Is there a box or container that might work? Remember to keep to the same scale for your furniture.

Many contemporary artists use non-traditional materials in their work—and they often use their work to raise questions about social issues. Let’s consider one artist from America and one from Ethiopia. 

Tomaselli creates layered, collaged images with vibrant colors and textures. He often explores the human impact on the natural environment in his work. 

The materials in this collage include acrylic paint and gouache. Gouache is a paint similar to watercolor, but with a thickener added that makes the paint opaque—not translucent like water color. Much of the background color is created with these paints, but the bird’s body and beak are collaged from magazine and published picture clippings. The beak is completely made of tiny pictures of bird beaks. The bird’s feathered body is made with tiny pictures of flowers. After he finishes painting and collaging the image on a wood panel, Tomaselli adds a layer of resin, which gives the surface a glossy finish.

This large work was designed by the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime. To make the 50 sections that are perfectly matched up to make patches and swirls of color, Sime used reclaimed electronic parts, including gears and plastic-coated wires in multiple colors. 

He finds many of the materials he uses in his work in the Mercato, a giant open-air market in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. One section of this market is known as the Menalesh Tera which means “what do you have?” In this area, reclaimed trash from all over the world—from buttons and bottle caps, to circuits, keyboards, and wires—is offered for sale. When Sime collects these materials for his work, he explains that he thinks of the stories behind the materials—about how they were used by many people in many places. He emphasizes that his works of art express his feelings about the ways in which we are all connected and part of the same world. He also considers how technology has changed the ways in which humans communicate with one another, wondering if something is being lost in virtual communication.

“When you don’t talk while looking eye to eye, how do you know one another? Or have a conversation? . . . . I am not in opposition to technology. It’s about how to balance it with “real” life. We’ve become off-balance. My title for my series of collages, Tightrope, has a double meaning. It’s about this equilibrium, but I also wanted it to evoke a string: if you pull it too tight, it will break.”

Continuous Rotation Servos, which supplied the gears in this work, allow one machine to guide the actions of another machine, and wires, of course, carry the electricity that makes many devices work. Do you think that Sime was thinking about the ways these parts were used as he designed this work?