Artist William Tunberg helps preserve artwork of marquetry alive

On a heat morning in August, William Tunberg sits throughout from his spouse, Camille, at a glass espresso desk. The fashionable piece of furnishings presents a stark distinction to the opposite results round the home: Brightly hued trinket wood containers are neatly organized on the eating desk; sculptural kinds in numerous shades of wooden adorn the partitions; and a big fruit bowl carved from timber balances precariously on the glass countertop. On nearer inspection, small items of brightly coloured veneer dance from these wood kinds, paying homage to the artwork type Tunberg has spent a lifetime perfecting: marquetry.

It wasn’t all the time his most popular medium. Tunberg hails from a household of writers — his father, William Tunberg, wrote the screenplay for “Outdated Yeller” and his uncle Karl Tunberg, additionally a screenwriter, was nominated for an Academy Award for “Ben-Hur.” But Tunberg all the time needed to be an artist. As a baby, he copied postage stamps and paintings he present in magazines. He painted landscapes of Oregon, the place his grandparents raised him, impressed by the works of de Chirico, Picasso and Magritte in highschool. His love of human portraits was kindled by the French painter Ingres, whose affect grew to become “an irrepressible pressure in my life,” Tunberg says.

After graduating from USC in 1965, Tunberg put down roots in Venice, Calif., opening a studio that counted Jim Morrison, Ben Talbert and Wallace Berman as his neighbors. Ultimately, he grew to become a life drawing teacher at faculties in Oregon and California.

He additionally started dabbling in assemblage, a type of sculpture the place peculiar objects are put collectively to type new items of artwork. “I used to be captivated by the narrative high quality of this artwork type,” he says, calling assemblage artwork a three-dimensional extension of surrealism.

Because the house for assemblage grew to become crowded within the Nineteen Eighties, Tunberg began in search of methods to make his artwork stand out. He turned to marquetry, a dying artwork type, to present his assemblages a recent look. Tunberg discovered himself particularly drawn to the shape as a result of “nobody was doing it” and since it was “not one thing that was spontaneous.”

Marquetry, which developed within the mid-1500s as a classy artwork type in Italy, makes use of items of wooden veneers positioned collectively by hand to type distinct designs. The craft grew to become widespread in France within the seventeenth century, the place floral marquetry patterns dominated furnishings throughout the reign of Louis XIV. A few of these historic strategies, together with the usage of a chevalet de marqueterie, a software to chop by means of veneer, are utilized in courses taught on the École Boulle in Paris and on the American College of French Marquetry in San Diego.

As Tunberg grew to become obsessive about marquetry, he studied historic strategies, together with the usage of horse hoof glue to mix items of veneer. He then began fascinated by how he may modernize them.

“I came upon that outdated marquetry takes fixed care. It’s all the time cracking and shifting round,” Tunberg says. “I needed to discover a technique to make it a bit extra more durable, extra resilient, so I’ve discovered strategies and glues and ways in which I can use that nobody is doing.”

By the tip of the ’80s, marquetry had grow to be his dominant medium. For Tunberg, the artwork type is “unmatched for magnificence and visible drama, and this can be very tough to make use of in superb artwork sculpture.”

Tunberg’s designs begin with a drawing, which he then converts to a vector file on a pc. Brows furrowed, he drags the mouse throughout the intense display to layer a curvilinear drawing of a blossom atop one other and hits a button. The laser cutter to his proper whirs to life, slicing the blossom design on slivers of plywood. Balancing it rigorously on his fingertips to his workstation, Tunberg then interchanges the blossoms he simply lower with totally different coloured ones that he’d beforehand lower.

This course of continues till he has half a dozen layers; the straightforward blossom has been stretched, curved and melded into an intricate, unrecognizable sample. “I wish to get very intricate and really sophisticated so that you simply don’t acknowledge one factor after which not see the remainder of it,” he says. “The concept is to acknowledge sections after which make the attention transfer round.”

Sculpture, furnishings, a fruit bowl and even jigsaw-puzzle-shaped storage containers inlaid with marquetry are fantastically displayed round his residence, but no two items look the identical. On nearer inspection, Tunberg factors out how the identical blossom sample, gear wheels and a lotus present up in numerous sculptures — he has a group of solely 50 of the drawings that he makes use of. These easy drawings of florals and different objects that encourage him are his base sample, which he then manipulates into the designs.

“Plenty of the drawings are repeated time and again, as a result of I preferred them. So I’ll perhaps change a dimension or angle or one thing like that,” he says. “I can bend, twist and place in such a means after which overlay one thing else on prime of them and get one thing extra attention-grabbing. You get quite a lot of substance.”

Tunberg’s work is fantasy-oriented, taking the thoughts on a journey of colour, contour and curvature. His work is a departure from conventional static marquetry, the place patterns and pictures are recognizable. As an alternative of typical components of landscapes, Tunberg strives to bridge the ornamental superb arts with marquetry bearing his personal sensibilities, the place observers can “try to discover attention-grabbing issues which might be buried in there, even when you make it up your self.”

One such piece: Tunberg’s fee by the Fish Interfaith Heart at Chapman College, which concerned him constructing an ark that protects a Torah that was smuggled to security throughout the Holocaust. Wanting folks to spend time scrutinizing and learning the artwork piece, he blended Judaism’s Ten Commandments in Hebrew in his marquetry design.

Throughout marquetry’s golden age, within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the method was used as an ornamental component for furnishings. It made one thing like a credenza “greater than a credenza,” as Tunberg explains. “It made it an object to be checked out and took you away from your self for a time period.” By incorporating marquetry in furnishings and on a regular basis objects like a fruit bowl, Tunberg seeks to make folks have a “totally different identification” with the thing.

“An merchandise of use can also be a chunk of artwork so it turns into nearer to you,” he says, gesturing on the eating chairs he constructed for the house he shares with Camille, his spouse. One of many chairs is impressed by hibiscus motifs to pay homage to his father-in-law, Alfred Shaheen, credited with popularizing the aloha shirt. “That one,” he factors at a chair, “I simply used a veneer as a result of after I put the 2 items of veneer collectively, it made a sort of animal face.” A Japanese ogi, or fan, is recognizable on a 3rd chair.

Camille has been instrumental in documenting Tunberg’s work, and enrolled in net design courses at a local people school to assist him create a web site for his items. The couple hope that Tunberg’s method to marquetry woodwork will survive, regardless of the challenges the medium poses for future generations.

Tunberg nonetheless undertakes commissions for giant industrial tasks — specialty sculptures for uncommon areas, furnishings, partitions and non secular objects. Just lately, he created vessels to accommodate Chapman College’s assortment of uncommon antiquities, together with a sculptural showcase defending a seven-volume assortment of the St. John’s Bible, which was handwritten utilizing medieval strategies of calligraphy and illumination, and a 7-foot-tall cupboard to show a fifteenth century Quran.

However on that heat August day, Tunberg put down the plywood and made plans with Camille to have a good time his 86th birthday with a quiet lunch from Complete Meals. Tomorrow, it’s again to creating the artwork he loves so dearly.