the love, life & work of Blake Johnson
Back when I was working on the Fisher Hill project I was able to take home a slab from one of the big logs we had on site, and it sat around my shop for a couple years since then. Finally this past summer I was able to get into making something fun and interesting […]
This was a very exciting project. I got to work for Judith Leemann who I had while I was a freshman in college, making two custom benches for her show arvensis in the Distillery Gallery in South Boston. She had acquired two big pine slabs, bookmatched, from a friends’ relative, and wanted their shapes to […]
A friend from college asked me a while back if I could build him and his fiance a bench for their porch. “Maybe 4-5 people” he said, and small enough to fit in a little back porch area, and be moved inside during the winters. Not too steep of a challenge, and he was so […]
I moved into a tiny room for a bit and needed to make great use of space, so I built this short, shallow, long desk with tons of drawers. I worked out some of my difficulty/baggage in getting drawers to work doing this. It was good. Even got some file bars in the lower ones. […]
I spent about a year and a half working nearly full-time at Doriss Design Workshoppe, a cabinetry/furniture/millwork shop in South Boston. It was a great low-key work environment, with all kinds of different an interesting projects coming in and out, and I learned a bunch about cabinetmaking, furniture fabrication, and some welding and spray finishing […]
Always a fan of experimenting and playing, I took on this project (and this class) as a last-minute thing, and it became a pivotal part of my semester. Funiture Design, taught by Peter Thibault and Judith Hanson, ran alongside the new Furniture Certificate program, a collaboration with the North Bennett Street School, the MassArt portion […]
Well this one’s been a long time coming. Not the greatest, but it’s done. That was all I really wanted out of it anyway. From the timberframe barn a few summers ago I snagged some scrap lumber, milled it down pretty primitively with chainsaw and circular saw into slabs and strips, and came out with […]
Last semester I tackled wood from as many points of view as possible. I made a wave-shaped bed form using an ArborTech grinder, I made some thin bent kinetic straps, a cradle that rocked diagonally, a creature head from a basswood log, and finally, this chair. I’d been tempting myself toward furniture for some time, […]