I love to drink wine. It is my complete beverage of choice and brings me much pleasure. It is a social experience and it is a solitary meditative experience. It enhances food, mood and if not too indulgent, just really relaxes you at the end of the day.
I am so fortunate to live so near to many amazing wine regions here in California. I do not get to visit them nearly as much as I would like to, but do get to visit vicariously through my work.
I love bringing my work together with food and wine and the utilitarian relationship they all share-
as well as creating mementos for folks to take home with them that will always remind them of the pleasure and retreat they experience when visiting these amazing places.
Over the past few years I have had the pleasure of creating what I call "high end curios" for the Silver Oak tasting room in Oakville, in the Napa Valley. These are one of a kind pieces using found and vintage objects with hand etched details--all with a wine region theme. These were just delivered:
This year I was asked to create platters riffing off the blue/white rustic chinoiserie line- for the retail shop at Auction Napa Valley 2014. It was great fun creating nearly 80 one of a kind pieces for this event that raised over 18 million dollars for community health care services.
And I recently shipped off pieces to the new LaFond Winery tasting room in Santa Barbara. They just opened a beautiful "in-town" tasting room showcasing their incredible wines as well as curated artisan pieces.
It is the enduring value of a curio when traveling. I always make sure to collect something when I am away, either a purchased object or something I find lying on the ground. This collection of things remains a big inspiration to me when conjuring up designs. It is the coming together of differing shapes, notions and elements of a culture- natural and ethnographic. Much of ancient pottery, besides its functional use as water and food vessels, evolved to incorporate more design and aesthetic elements as people began to collect it.It was traded and sold and re-sold. And often became incredibly valuable over time. But more importantly keeps memories alive and helps put perspective on where we have been.
