Pond Hockey

The photos in this album probably induce more homesickness than any I've taken recently. Ellis is playing ice hockey on the frozen Lake Michigan amidst a sky worthy of a John Constable painting. I was raised with the sport, (my father played goalie until the age of 86) so perhaps I'm a bit biased, but I feel that something of the core of the American North is wrapped up in its bold lines and immediacy. Our family immigrated from Belgium and England to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to work in the iron mines, trading poverty in the old world for poverty in the new. My father would always wear these LL Bean boots while shoveling the driveway or getting a rink ready for a neighborhood game of pond hockey.

Now Ellis has his own pair and is down on the lake playing after school. Though I will betray a bit more regional bias, I've come to feel that the austere winters of the north have done a lot to influence my design aesthetic. When I worked with Dansk International Designs, our products were expressly influenced by the clean lines of Scandinavian design. Later, working in architecture and product design, we created simple board and batten home furnishings based on the brightly colored seaside homes of Norway and Sweden, and built cabinetry of white Baltic Birch. Since these experiences, I've inevitably kept these influences present in my work. It's really about an emphasis on elementality. Nature gives us the sky, the water, the trees, and the ice. This is the palette. What we create emerges from who we are.