Baraboo, Wisconsin Artist Steven Spiro: Sculptural Wood Furniture
To emphasize his furniture's unpretentiousness as well as its graciousness and consideration, Steven Spiro warmly and emotionally connects it to the land.
Quiet, bare and distant. The Baraboo Range of Wisconsin is the the place where Steven Spiro shapes his functional visions, off a long, windy country road interspersed with dairy cows, weather-beaten barns, and dew-covered tractors.
Steven Spiro Sculptural Wood Furniture
At a sharp curve, a plain, brown shop much belying the vivid, effervescent nature of the practical fittings made within. Inside, Spiro, lanky, bearded, professorial looking, making use of rulers, sketchpads, saws and tools, transposes abstract ideas into handy art. His lone assistant, a stocky, bespectacled local father of 10, spreads thirty to forty cudgels of wood – eclectic as Rosewood from Africa and local Bird’s Eye Maple – across the floor, awaiting connection to a flat table top.
This land – barren in the winter, fertile and verdant in summer, always sequestered – helps Spiro synthesize the charm of aestheticism and curious intellect which is his reality. Here, there are no psychological or artistic impasses. No lack of inspiration. No stagnation or inertia.
“It’s very difficult not to work out here,” says Steven Spiro (interview with author). “One piece generally leads and branches to the next. One piece invariably suggests many, many directions. We are surrounded by wildlands and 160 acres of pretty wild property, even wolves and bear come around here. So, to me, the possibilities which naturally extend from being here and working here are endless. I just sort of hideout here.”
Spiro’s signature style gives organic form to furniture: grace and lyricism combined with joinery, solid wood, geometric highlighting, organic sensibilities, skillful inlaying, smooth layers, and carved curves. His love of form, imagery and technique combine a palpable sense of naturalistic, abstract and impressionistic themes. Organic is the word Spiro most frequently uses to describe his underlying principle, a distinct mode he has chosen to work with for more than 25 years.
When he says organic, Spiro means that he only employs the natural colors of the wood, he does not stain or paint or embellish with any sort of spreads. So too is there a dimension of expressionism, a mysterious story of dreams and imagery, an art form which straddles the interface of nature and humanity.
Spiro Furniture, Baraboo
“Organic is working with the beauty of the material and integrating my mind and life in with the life of the tree,” says Spiro. “Trees are, after all, a combination of earth, sun, water, starlight, clouds, and a myriad of other distinct elements. If one can see a cloud in a tree, why not a dreamscape in a table?”
As a college student in the 1970s, Spiro “started out in literature and poetry,” but somehow moved on to woodworking, which he sometimes embeds with mythological symbols such as moons, planets, galaxies, and stars, or the seven directions (north, south, east, west, sky, earth, and eternity). He still, however, has never lost his love of verse or text, and imparts the beauty of both in the splendor of timber.
“These pieces of furniture are poems,” he laughs, “haikus, all different kinds of poems, and stories.”
Indeed, one comes to a passage in Keats that speaks exactly to Spiro’s condition: “The innumerable compositions and recompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snaillike perception of Beauty.”
To emphasize the furniture’s unpretentiousness as well as its graciousness and consideration, Spiro warmly and emotionally connects it to the land.While the aesthetics of his work have evolved, his techniques haven’t changed. He has made a mantra out of using solid, high-quality wood, shunning any type of plywood or particle board. He says that there is a strong visceral sense felt when one interacts with materials or produces objects that he or others can use.
“That a human being would actually take some material, and a few machines, and make something, seems so odd to many,” says Spiro. “And there aren’t a lot of young people doing this. A lot of people want to make money with little or no effort.”
The true beauty of functional art, the fact that people integrate objects into their lives and value and pass them on, is most satisfying to Spiro. While his furniture is perhaps on the higher end of the fiscal spectrum, he says that it is “not necessarily for the rich.”
“I have some Hollywood people who collect what I do,” says Spiro “One of whom is Anthony Hopkins, and I am grateful for that. But I let people who may need to stretch a little pay me on installments. I just shipped a piece to a postal worker in Maryland. I am flattered by anyone who wants to own what I consider my direct spirit.”
Steven Spiro Furniture Art, Baraboo, WI
Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea of churning out multiples or firing off reproductions doesn’t interest Spiro. And while the connection between the builder and the owner is one that Spiro respects and does his best to cultivate, it’s the strong bond between good art and longevity that leaves him most ponderous.
“I’ve seen exhibits of 5,000-year-old Chinese wood furniture which still looks great and masterful,” says Spiro. “It reminds me that furniture has a life of its own, and that I need to be careful what I put out there. One day the maker will be long forgotten, but the piece will proceed on its own life path.”