During an early seminar, one of my mentors said: “If you think about it, we are Boxologists”. He went on to explain that when we make a drawer, it must fit in a dresser, which fits in a room, which fits in a house…something like the Matryoshka, those russian dolls that nest inside one another. The gist was that we would be called upon during our careers to build boxes, build them well, but design them with careful consideration as to function, material and construction.
There are pretty boxes and plain boxes; the complex and serviceable, the treasured and the necessary. All the boxes that follow are from the first half of my career, they are the pretty, complex and treasured sort and are in more or less chronological order.
A box with a drawer, or a box in a box. This little chest was inspired by a very poor black and white photo in the book “Pennsylvania German Collection (Handbooks in American Art)” by Beatrice B. Garvan, Publisher: Philadelphia Museum Of Art, ISBN -10: 0876330359.A box with a lot of little boxes. They are usually called Spice Chests, but period inventories show that they often held small valuables. The drawer dividers here were double beaded which looks nice but is a bit challenging in the difficult hard grain of this wood. The larger center drawer is said to be where a sugar-loaf would be keptA “Box-on-Frame” built around 1996 and interpreted from an illustration in the book “The Pennsylvania Spice Box: Paneled Doors and Secret Drawers” by Lee Ellen Griffith, Publisher: Chester County Historical Society, 1986 ISBN-10: 092970603X.When does a box become a chest? Is it a question of what goes inside? This is a scaled-down chest, 1/3 the normal size. Has it become a box? I enjoy painting the work, but the time required makes it a bit impractical, so now I just do it for family.
Sticks & Glue 
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