History & Handcrafting on Crosby Street

Underneath a bank of skylights in her Crosby Street loft, with all her tools arrayed on a butcher block work table, artist Jill Platner makes her signature feather-like metal jewelry by hand. She’s developed a method for joining pieces of metal so that it drapes like fabric, and she has an acute feel for the material and knowledge of the tools of her trade. And she does all this inside a Federal style house in NoHo that practically radiates American history. Originally built in 1823 as a townhouse for James Roosevelt, an ancestor of FDR, in the 1850s the building housed a hospital run by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn a medical degree. With her sister Emily, also a physician (the sisters were the first and third women in America to earn medical degrees, respectively) Blackwell rented the building in 1857 and made it the home of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. With the help of wealthy benefactors, many of them Quaker, the Blackwells ran the first hospital in America that was staffed entirely by women. 

The hospital ran by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell that occupied the Crosby Street building in the 1850s.

Platner is fascinated by the building’s past, and her painstaking work renovating the building has revealed tantalizing pieces of its history. When she first toured it as a young designer in need of studio space in the 1990s, she noticed details like the chisel marks on the wooden beams—clearly the handiwork of a skilled craftsman—and recognized something of a kindred spirit. Platner made the light-filled top floor her studio, then expanded into the adjacent carriage house which is where she fabricates jewelry and makes large-scale metal sculptures.

The original flooring before being salvaged and milled by The Hudson Company.

In 2007 when she was preparing to buy her space, Platner discovered the story of the Blackwell sisters. Her top-floor studio was once the dormitory for the physicians and interns, while the lower floors were devoted to the maternity and illness wards, the pharmacy, and the waiting area. By 2012, when Platner became a part owner of the building, it was badly in need of repairs. There were bulging bricks and the roof was in dire straits. But she was committed to keeping intact as much of the building’s original material as she could, and that’s where The Hudson Company came in. Underneath some particle board, she discovered ten-inch wide boards that were original to the house. Well worn and quite uneven, Platner arranged to send the salvaged boards up to Pine Plains where they were milled and finished, then reinstalled. Now even and uniform, but still full of history and character, the floors are back where they belong on Crosby Street. “It looks incredible,” Platner says. “You can feel history in it.”

Jill Platner’s Studio. Photo credit: Aundre Larrow for The New York Times.

Inspiration in Imperfection: Reclaimed Wood and JB Blunk's Handcrafted Legacy

JB Blunk’s home on the Inverness Ridge with Redwood Enry Arch, 1976. Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

J.B. Blunk’s art career was probably inevitable one form or another, but it was a chance encounter with Isamu Noguchi in a Tokyo craft shop that put him on course to become one of the most innovative American craftsmen of the 20th century. It was the early 1950s, and Blunk—then a soldier in the US Army, stationed in Korea—was browsing at the craft shop when he met Noguchi who was there with his wife. Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Prior to his tour in Korea, Blunk had been a student at UCLA where he became fascinated by ceramics, and Noguchi decided to introduce him to the Japanese artistic polymath Kitaoji Rosanjin, who made exquisite, rustic and colorful pottery inspired by historical Japanese ceramics, as well as lacquerware and calligraphy. Blunk apprenticed himself to Rosanjin, became a skilled potter in his own right, and later worked for artist Toyo Kaneshige, a Living National Treasure. Returning to California in 1954, he was now energized and inspired to embark on a life in which craft shaped every corner of his life. Blunk’s name isn’t synonymous with midcentury style, and he’s not a household name. (Yet.) But with exhibitions in major galleries, including Kasmin and Blum & Poe, introducing his work to new audiences, his legacy seems to be getting the second look it deserves.

J.B. Blunk in his studio, c.1968. Courtesy: J.B. Blunk Collection

Interior of JB Blunk’s home with river stones and artworks by Blunk. Untitled painting, c.1990, and Redwood stool, c.1965.
Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

J.B. Blunk (1926–2002) was born in Ottawa, Kansas, and studied physics before switching to ceramics in college. Like Wharton Esherick, Blunk was an artist who didn’t make much of a distinction between home and studio. And like George Nakashima, he found much inspiration in the natural structure of wood—its knots, grain, colors, and textures. Blunk settled in the town of Inverness in the mid-1950s, and decided to build a cabin there himself. Now known as the Blunk House, the home was described in T Magazine as “a cottage from a midcentury-modern fairytale.” There’s a potter’s studio with three kilns, and a woodshop. Maria Nielson, Blunk’s daughter, and the author of a book on Blunk’s work, spends time at the house, where her father made everything from the sleeping loft to the ceramics in the kitchen by hand.

Woven into the fabric of the landscape and the house itself is redwood. The table in Blunk’s kitchen is crafted from a gigantic slab of redwood, and they dot the mountainous landscape of Inverness as far as the eye can see. Blunk was active in a variety of media, including clay and cast bronze, but his primary medium was wood. Sometimes a chainsaw was part of the picture. Blunk’s favored wood species was redwood, though he occasionally used cypress. Redwood’s characteristic color and natural softness gives it working properties that are almost clay-like. Blunk would salvage chunks of redwood on the landscape that had been discarded by loggers, and make use of his findings in the ways that best suited their scale. Using his chainsaw, he’d carve chairs out of single pieces of wood, sometimes creating “seating sculptures” that seemed to hover somewhere between sculpture and furniture. According to Mariah Nielson, even the bathroom sink in the Blunk House bears chisel marks.

Interior of JB Blunk’s home with artworks by Blunk, sofa by Max Frommeld, and cushions by Christine Nielson and Nancy Waite Harlow.
Photo credit: ©LeslieWilliamson

From his time studying ceramics in Japan, Blunk was steeped in the aesthetic and philosophical principle of wabi sabi, which is difficult to translate precisely, but in an artistic context means accepting transience and imperfection, finding beauty in it, and not trying to “fix” anything about an object. Wabi sabi had a powerful influence on both historical Japanese crafts and on mingei, the Japanese craft revival movement that emerged there in response to industrialization in the 1930s, and was several decades underway when Blunk visited Tokyo.

A wabi sabi approach to craft could mean embracing asymmetry, or a nick or a scratch, or a perceived flaw in a piece of wood—like a discarded burl of no interest to commercial loggers. Blunk took the lesson of his craft training and applied it to working with reclaimed wood. Natural “flaws” became centerpieces, and odd shapes were just another form of inspiration. A major work entitled “The Planet,” completed in 1969, can be viewed at the Oakland Museum of California. It’s made from a single, the enormous root structure of a redwood—the only remains of a long-dead tree. It was typical of Blunk to salvage something that others had overlooked, and to create from it something unique, odd, and beautiful, that seemed at once ancient and modern. Perfection isn’t easy. But imperfection, at its best, is even harder to achieve. It seems safe to say that J.B. Blunk nailed it.

Wishbone, 1977. Sculpted Redwood, 110h x 54w x 35d in.
Image via Jason Jacques Gallery.

Inside Man: Contemplating Art and the Interior World with Donald Judd

Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982-1986, Mill aluminum, 100 units each 41 x 51 x 72 inches.

The artistic legacy of sculptor Donald Judd (1928–1994) is getting a lot of attention this spring: there is a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Ann Temkin, and a massive plywood installation at Gagosian Gallery, on view for the first time since 1981. This flurry of activity has fallen, quite by chance, at an odd moment: you can’t see either exhibition in person, because—as of this writing—institutions across the United States (and especially in New York City) are closed to the public in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19. There’s also a book, and this you can read anywhere: Donald Judd Spaces, edited by Flavin Judd, Rainer Judd and the Judd Foundation, which offers newly published photographs from Judd’s archive, as well as five essays by Judd himself.

Judd is typically classified as a sculptor, but he didn’t like that term, nor did he like “minimalism.” He described his efforts as “another activity of some kind.” He began his career as a painter, and in the late 1950s and early ‘60’s, he worked as an art critic. This role gave him access to the postwar New York art world, where at the time Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme. As a blue chip artist today, Judd’s work is immediately recognizable: geometric, orderly, colorful, architectural, and smooth. Judd wasn’t precious about craftsmanship: once he began making three-dimensional objects, he started working with industrial fabricators, especially a commercial sheet-metal shop called Bernstein Brothers, providing them with detailed drawings and plans. In 1968, he bought a cast iron building on Spring Street in SoHo, and renovated it floor by floor, using it as his art studio and residence.

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Judd in the early 1960’s in his studio on East 19th Street in New York City.

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“Untitled” (1991) is among the many untitled works in ”Judd” at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition opens on March 1.Credit...Donald Judd Art; Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Zack DeZon for The New York Times.

In 1971, he rented a small house in Marfa, Texas, eventually assembling the compound around the Ayala de Chinati Ranch and the abandoned buildings of U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell, which would in 1979 become the Chinati Foundation, with support from the Dia Art Foundation. In addition to the collection of important large-scale works by Judd and contemporaries like Claes Oldenburg, Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain, the Chinati Foundation preserves Judd’s living quarters and studio exactly as he specified. The Judd foundation does the same in New York where his Spring Street loft building is carefully preserved as a working and living space.

Writing of the MoMA retrospective in the New York Times in February of this year, critic Holland Cotter described Judd’s early forays into 3D work thus: “It was three-dimensional, so it wasn’t painting but, he claimed, it wasn’t sculpture either. He called the new works “specific objects,” and left it at that. He titled all of these objects “Untitled,” and insisted they were devoid of metaphors, personal data or real-world references — all the lures, in other words, that art traditionally uses to draw us in.” It may have been devoid of “lures,” but it wasn’t devoid of references: Judd’s specific objects, and the dwellings and studio spaces he designed them in, were the very “personal data” and “real-world references” Cotter believed Judd eschewed. Judd was a creature of the interior.

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An installation view showing, in the foreground, “Untitled” (1963/1975); one of Judd’s earliest experimental objects (from 1961), left, with a baking pan sunk in its surface; and, right, a 1963 piece that shows him playing with space. Credit: Donald Judd Art; Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Zack DeZon for The New York Times.

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Some of Judd’s objects come with special effects: Peer into either end of a row of the four aluminum boxes that make up this 1969 work and you’ll find that they form a long blue corridor with a reflective surface. Credit: Donald Judd Art; Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Zack DeZon for The New York Times.

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Donald Judd - Daybed, 1979, Pine wood (with canvas mattress). 112 x 115 x 203 cm.

This is one of the key themes of Donald Judd Spaces, which brings readers into Judd’s material world. He placed objects and furniture in specific locations, and while he lived in New York and in Texas, he created works of art that themselves framed out space, with colors, forms, surfaces, and gaps. The Judd Foundation restored his residences and studios, so when visitors see them, they’re seeing something like a 20th century historic house museum rather than a collection of sculpture. The differences between his studio work and his forays into architectural preservation are mainly questions of scale: where he made room-size installations in his works of art, he also restored a SoHo building and conserved old structures on what is now the site of the Chinati Foundation, which could be read as gigantic Judd-type sculptures astride the landscape.

Right now during this indeterminate period of quarantine, it’s possible to read about Judd’s work, see some of his outdoor sculpture if you happen to be in Münster, Germany, the campus of Northern Kentucky University, or Marfa, Texas. You can watch an interview with Judd on YouTube via the Museum of Modern Art’s website—all part of a movement that’s taken shape in the past few weeks known as #MuseumFromHome. In a way, Judd’s work is particularly compelling right now because we’re experiencing an abundance of shared two-dimensional experiences: working remotely, reading the news on a tablet, playing games, streaming Netflix, even gazing out the window. The picture plane is all around us, signs and symbols everywhere. But inside, where we may least expect it, complexity and an abundance of forms in space abound. Our furniture, personal belongings, papers, and kitchen implements can all be seen, if we choose, as an interior landscape to be explored rather than overlooked or taken for granted. That’s the ironic twist of Judd’s temporarily hidden exhibitions: just thinking about them rather than seeing them—and indeed of Judd’s own spaces in New York and Texas—can make us see our own interior worlds in a new way.

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READ THE BOOK: DONALD JUDD SPACES

An unprecedented visual survey of the living and working spaces of the artist Donald Judd in New York and Texas.

The Art of Yun Hyong-keun: Where Nature and Abstraction Meet

Yun Hyong-keun at his atelier in Sinchon, 1974. Courtesy Estate of Yun Hyong-keun. Image Copyright: Yun Seong-ryeol.

Spend some time looking at a painting by artist Yun Hyong-keun (1928 – 2007), and you might imagine that you’re looking at a group of trees. Dark, vertical forms stand at either side of the canvas. Seen one way, they appear to be massive tree trunks on either side of an open clearing. Or seen another way, they could be the dark edges of a wooded area at night, and in between them, the beam of a flashlight splits the darkness. Yun Hyong-keun is a widely acclaimed abstract painter, but there is something unusually earthy about his works on paper and canvas. His compositions seem to echo the architecture of the natural world, not in a sweet or cloying way, but with a sense of nature’s great power. With the knowledge that he spent time as a dissident during the Korean war hiding in a forest, the sight of large, imposing trees is a complex thing to behold. Are they protectors? Do they portend danger? Yun Hyong-keun spent decades of his extraordinary career negotiating these forms two dimensionally, all the while exploring and expanding on traditional Korean painting and paper-making techniques.

Yun Hyong-Keun, Umber-Blue (1978). Oil on cotton. 80.6 cm x 100 cm. Courtesy Estate of Yun Hyong-keun. Image Copyright: Yun Seong-ryeol.

In an essay for Ocula Magazine written on the occasion of Yun’s exhibition at Venice’s Palazzo Fortuny in 2019, critic Sherry Paik recounted the artist’s harrowing youth during the decades of World War II, the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the Korean War. According to the exhibition’s curator, Kim Inhye, he never set out to be a political artist, whose work referenced or mocked propaganda. But the circumstances of his life wouldn’t permit him to be a bystander. During his childhood in the 1930’s in Cheongju, Korea was occupied by Japan, and he was 17 when the end of World War II terminated the occupation in 1945. Yun went to study painting at Seoul National University, but he participated in protests against the U.S. Military Government in Korea, which had established the school, and he was expelled. Because of his activities, Yun was then placed under surveillance and enrolled in an anti-Communist program designed to re-educate suspected communists called the Bodo League. In 1950, when the Korean War began, many members (some of whom didn’t even realize they had been signed up) were executed. Yun escaped arrest and death by hiding in the woods.

Yun Hyong-keun, Burnt Umber & Ultramarine (1989). Oil on linen. 45.5 x 61 cm. Courtesy Estate of Yun Hyong-keun. Image Copyright: Yun Seong-ryeol.

Remarkably, Yun never stopped thinking about art, or making it whenever he could. In the early 1950s, he met the artist Kim Whanki, who helped Yun enroll at Hongik University in Seoul where he continued painting. His work at this time was awash in color, and he used vivid hues to make abstract forms. He painted on hanji—a traditional Korean paper made from the bark of mulberry trees—on which color would bleed and give his abstract shapes soft, feathery edges. By the 1970s, Yun and Kim were both considered members of a movement in abstract Korean contemporary art called Dansaekhwa. Working during these decades in postwar Korea, artists like Yun and his contemporaries did not have access to abundant artists’ materials. They were creative, and used what they had at hand: Korean handmade paper (hanji), pencils and ink, even coal, burlap, and iron. According to Sherry Paik, the Dansaekhwa artists experimented with “ways of manipulating material, including soaking, pulling, pushing, dragging, or ripping paper.” 

Yun Hyong-keun, Untitled (1972). Oil on hanji (Korean mulberry paper). 49 x 33 cm. Courtesy Estate of Yun Hyong-keun. Image Copyright: Yun Seong-ryeol.

Yun Hyong-keun: A Retrospective, 2019 Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy. Photo credit: © Laziz Hamani / Courtesy: The Estate of Yun Hyong-keun.

Yun was never entirely at home in Korea for political reasons, but his work started to gain attention abroad in Japan in the mid-1970s. By this time he had begun using more creative materials, particularly burnt umber and ultramarine blue paint on raw linen or canvas.

He had an exhibition in 1976 at the Muramatsu Gallery in Tokyo, and collectors in Japan began to buy his work. In the early 1990s, American Artist Donald Judd visited Korea where he had an exhibition at the Inkong Gallery in Seoul. Judd was taken by Yun’s work, and invited him to visit America, and to show his work at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas in 1994. Yun was then selected by the government of Korea to represent the country at the 46th Venice Biennale—an achievement that would have been nearly impossible to imagine in Yun’s earlier life.

Yun passed away in 2007, aged 79. The exhibition of his work at the Palazzo Fortuny was a meaningful coda to his exhibition at the Venice Biennale several decades earlier. The space in which the exhibition was staged is a grand, imperfect, sometimes raw space, with a riot of textures and colors, surrounded by water. Yun’s work always reflected nature’s mystery. He used natural materials inventively throughout his life to realize his ideas, from mulberry bark paper and burnt umber to linen and charcoal. Seen against the backdrop of this idiosyncratic, historic setting—rather than workaday perfection of a typical white cube gallery—Yun’s paintings seemed right at home: works of art, perched on the line that divides abstract design from natural forms, made with the materials and tools at hand, mapping the edges of nature, as the water lapped against the building.

Yun Hyong-keun: A Retrospective, 2019, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy. Photo credit: © Laziz Hamani.

The Hudson Company + Amanda Jane Jones

Define Magazine, founded by designer Amanda Jane Jones

“Define came out of what felt like a need. There were so many artists that I collaborate with who talked about wanting more opportunities to create work just for the sake of creating.”

— Amanda Jane Jones

The designer at home.

A peak inside Define Magazine.

The Hudson Company + Amanda Jane Jones

Amanda Jane Jones is a award-winning, freelance graphic designer and art director based in Chicago, IL but currently living with her family in Geneva, Switzerland. During her career, Amanda has collaborated with a variety of creative brands, including VSCO, Solly Baby, Kinfolk Magazine (as co-founder), and Artifact Uprising. Amanda's current passion project is the elegant new creative quarterly, Define Magazine.

When we asked Amanda to create a custom mood board for our ongoing series of creative collaborations, we knew it would be be a gorgeous, minimalist's meditation on color and simplicity. In this, we certainly weren't disappointed. But it's the story behind the items that Amanda chose to feature in her mood board that are especially fascinating: photos of her children, Pantone color swatches, and skipping stones from the shores of Lake Michigan.

Here is the story behind Amanda's lovely mood board for The Hudson Company...

5 Questions with Amanda Jane Jones

Tell us about the items included in your mood board, what's their origin story? Why did you select them for this mood board?

I'm always looking for calming influences in my life and strive for my home to be minimal, quiet, simple and calming. And since we live just a quick walk away from Lake Michigan (where I vacationed as a child with my family) I often take my children there throughout the year. The colors of the lake have always inspired me. Every time I visit the lake, I come home with at least one rock that we keep in jars on our bookshelves. The homes along Lake Michigan - especially in the Glen Arbor area - have always inspired me as well, with their white-washed wood exteriors. The Lake brings back peaceful, happy, calm memories. If the kids (or I) are ever grumpy or in a slump of some sort, the Lake is the first place we visit - the wind coming off of Lake Michigan seems to cure all. 

How do you use mood boards in your professional work? What role do they play in your creative process?

I utilize a lot of mood boards in my work. It's a huge part of my design process. I start with brainstorming, looking through my collection of books to get ideas. I also have an inspiration wall at home that I love to cover with ephemera I've collected from my travels or received from friends.

Tell us about your inspiration for Define Magazine: where did the concept come from and what inspired you to create this publication?

Define came out of what felt like a need. There were so many artists that I collaborate with who talked about wanting more opportunities to create work just for the sake of creating. It's hard to make time for personal work amid the day to day of creating for clients - so it was born out of an idea to create a space for artists to feel free to create for the sake of creating.

From my own experience, I know that artists hunger to work on projects uninhibited by the client filter and we jump at a chance to collaborate with other artists on a global scale—to make something beautiful and thought-provoking. The basis of Define is simple: each issue focuses on a single word defined by a unique set of artists through various mediums. 

So far it's been exciting to see artists explore the same theme through different perspectives. We hope it's a magazine that resonates with both artists and art lovers, so that we are able to accumulate a collection of definitions that create a beautiful anthology to be enjoyed and re-defined for years to come

Are there specific places that you turn when you need fresh ideas or inspiration? Particular books, other creative people, blogs, etc.?

When I'm in a design slump, I always go for a walk. Fresh air is always a quick fix. Also, books - both old and new. I don't think you can ever have too many books. Oh, and I love Maira Kalman - she's an endless inspiration to me.

Why did you chose this particular Hudson Company flooring as the background for mood board?

With Select Harvest Ash [Neva Finish], I love how white it is - the color is just perfect. Again, there's something calming about this kind of floor and so I'm naturally drawn to the tone and fell of Neva. At home, we recently painted our kitchen floor white and I love how it's brightened our space.

You can learn more about Amanda Jane's work on her website and you will certainly want to follow her on Instagram as well. Here you can learn more about Define Magazine. All mood board photos by Gentl and Hyers. 

Learn more about Select Harvest [Neva Finish] here. 

Custom mood board by designer Amanda Jane Jones for The Hudson Company, featuring Select Harvest Ash [Neva Finish] flooring.

Inspired By: Installation Artist Pernille Snedker Hansen

All photos taken from www.snedkerstudio.dk.

Partly calculation, partly chance: The Evolution of Formation

It's not every day that we stumble upon an artist or maker doing something truly innovative with wood flooring, but when we discovered the work of Copenhagen-based artist and craftswoman Pernille Snedker Hansen - we were totally floored.

The founder of Snedker Studio, Pernille specializes in custom, handcrafted wood surfaces and commissioned artworks. Her current work is defined by the use of colorful patterns and organic forms applied to both paper and wood flooring. By combining the random with the intentional - her work is at once whimsical and structured.

One admirer has described Pernille's work as, "immersive artworks" and we have to agree - by replicating the fluid, asymmetrical aesthetics of nature and combining those forms with the careful human touch of the artisan, Ms. Snedker Hansen is creating works that are both singular and inspiring. 

Another perspective on the artist's work, from her own website:

"In search of visual phenomena in nature like structures of wood, grain, patterns of growth, Pernille Snedker Hansen sets out to experiment with techniques to imitate and magnify nature. Organic processes become scripts for the artist’s movements with her tools: water, numerous small bottles filled with various colors, wood, paper and a careful choice of colour combinations; combing through materialised occurrences like a colour drop spreading in the water basin, pushed away from its inner circle to the edge by the next drop falling into it. What happens is partly calculation, partly chance, loosing the artist’ hold on the process but at the same time being incredible aware and highly concentrated on the evolution of formation."

Our team is always on the lookout for creative makers who are pushing the boundary of what's possible in wood flooring design and Ms. Snedker Hansen certainly fits that description. We're especially smitten with her Refraction and Arch flooring installations. And while we can't wait to see what this inspiring artists comes up with next, there's plenty of Pernille's work out there to admire. Trust us, you want to dive into the full spectrum of her impressive and chromatic body of work.

You can learn more about Pernille at her official website and follow her inspiring posts on Instagram. All photos taken from www.snedkerstudio.dk.

The artist at work in her Copenhagen studio.

All photos taken from www.snedkerstudio.dk.