When asked by a student what his favorite tool was—despite being a woodworker—Wendell Castle answered, “The pencil. The act of drawing is the same as the act of thinking.” For Castle, drawing was the starting point for his designs. He also once said, “I’m not concerned about the practical things that go into most design thinking.” Rather than being burdened with functional considerations, Castle approached furniture design as sculpture; all else could be eliminated in the pursuit of the perfect form. The present chairs perfectly exemplify this approach to furniture design.
“I invent, distort, deform, exaggerate, compound and confuse as I see it.” —Wendell CastleWhile working towards his MFA in Sculpture and searching for a technique that would allow him to realize his drawings, Castle recalled an article he read as a child about how to build a duck decoy. The guide showed how wood could be horizontally cut, stacked, and laminated to form a unique shape. Once the wood was laminated, it could be carved and sanded until the only sign of this process that remained was the encircling stripes of the subsections of wood. New shapes could now be almost extracted from the wood to protrude in strange and unpredictable ways. Castle went on to create a number of works, such as the present lot, empolying this innovative technique and these masterful chairs truly embody his unique design ethos.