JB BLUNK
1926-2002, United StatesIt is hard to know where to place Blunk as a craftsman. Though he has achieved his primary success as a woodworker, he has also created an extensive body of work in clay, carved stone and cast bronze and has even made jewelry and weavings. Furthermore, he tends to blur the categories of furniture and non-functional sculpture as if they weren’t there. For Blunk, the issue of art status does not come up; he works without a conception of such a fixed category. His attitude towards such issues is reminiscent of the Japanese indifference towards distinction between art and craft.
Throughout his career, Blunk has been unusually integrated with his surroundings, and in many ways, his own home may be his masterpiece. Perched atop a ridge near the small town of Inverness, the house is like the man himself: rough, but with innumerable touches of sensitivity; modest in its scale, but astonishing in its depth; and detached from the hustle and bustle of modern life, but bristling with energy nonetheless. He has stayed true to an aesthetic and a value system that has little to do with the current craft world. Blunk’s work is powerful in its freedom, simplicity, and lack of preconception about what furniture should be.
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