A Fusion of Pattern and Form
Intricate patterns are an obsession for Ben Strear, and his carved and painted basswood pieces strive to fuse pattern with form.-From Fine Woodworking #276
![]() Unlike Escher’s playfully realistic artwork, Strear’s pieces are more allusive than literal; in both form and pattern they give the impression of something faintly remembered and full of meaning but not quite knowable: a fragmentary fossil, a weathered bone, an ancient writing tablet. Strear often starts his pieces on the lathe and uses an angle grinder, rasps, files, and sandpaper to complete the underlying shape. He transfers his pattern design one square at a time from graph paper to a grid he draws on the workpiece, then carves the pattern with gouges and skews. The carving, he says, is an endurance test, and can take hundreds of hours. It’s not easy re-creating antiquity. |
—Jonathan Binzen
More of Ben’s work can be found at the following links:
@benstrear
strear.work/
Photos by Ben Strear
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