art furniture – Summerhouse Art

A Bedside Table, appropriately titled, “Night Flyer”

Posted on September 19, 2014June 5, 2020 by Helen

This little night table is next in our series of upcycled furniture pieces. As we’ve gone on our Saturday garage sailing travels this summer we’ve found some lovely bits of furniture.

Bits that we are slowly and carefully applying our version of artistry to. This little night table started out as a rather plain black night table.

Will wandered around it for some time, waiting to find out what to do with it, or as he said, what the table told him it wanted. Finally, he decided that it wanted to be black and white. So the stripes on the drawer appeared.

From that point on, it became a 3D painting. And not just on the drawer front as on the Green Night Table. The whole table became a painting where collaged bits appeared, and sanding down to the old colors to bring out it’s history and a bit of texture too.

I rather like what sanding brought out in the legs, myself. The final flourish was the black and white drawer pull, oversized but with a definite sense of humour.

And yes, it does have a title, also after long deliberation. It’s called “Night Flyer”. Appropriate, don’t you think, for a night table? This table, along with other art furniture we’ve made is now listed for sale on Diggit, a local online sales site.

"Night Flyer" Table By Will Bushell — “Night Flyer” Table By Will Bushell

The Rescue of the Little Magazine Stand

Posted on August 14, 2014June 5, 2020 by Helen

I wish I had a “before” photo of this little magazine stand. Somehow, when I decided to start on it, taking photos was not on my mind. The table started out as a piece of furniture found at a garage sale, one of those projects people start, don’t finish and want to get out site.

The sides that held the magazines were missing, the table itself was stripped, badly. And there it sat, sort of forlorn really, almost waiting for a new start. We talk these days about “rescue dogs”, but that day I felt like I needed to rescue this little table. So I brought it home.

The first thing I decided it needed was a mosaic on the top. And luckily, Will made it so easy by routing out most of top to create an area to put mosaic in, so that it would be flush with the top. I chose happy colors for the mosaic.

The next problem was to create new sides for holding the magazines. We looked up the styles, we pondered, we threw some ideas around, but none seemed to work. Then one day I just happened to notice an old wall display shelf, one of those odd ones with little turned spindles between the shelves and we basically cut in half and created two whole new sides for the little table.

In fact the holes that the spindles went through originally, were added to, to become a design element of circles which we carried on with the round wooden feet, made from wooden balls found at a lumber store.

Then it was just a matter of choosing colors. Black with punchy little red round feet just struck me as the answer. Which led to the little red balls on the ends of the new spindles to carry on the theme.

All in all, it has been rescued, reborn and re-created. It looks so much happier than that forlorn little table in the driveway. It almost needs a name. Will says, “How about CoCo? That’s sort of a round and happy name.” So CoCo it is. Now that it’s been rescued, it really needs a new home. It’s now on our new shop on Diggit.

The Story of the Little Green Night Table

Posted on August 12, 2014June 5, 2020 by Helen

Almost everything creative that we do has some connection to recycling. My mosaics are made from recycled or as Will likes to say “upcycled” dishes and ornaments.

Will uses a lot of collage in his work using all sorts of found ephemera from old photos to just bits and pieces. We live this great life of searching for good used “stuff” to re-use, for our art, for our home and almost everything else. And now we are doing something with furniture. Such was the case with this little night table, found ages ago, waiting for an idea, a vision, of what it was to become.

I happened to say to Will, sort of offhandedly actually, “Why don’t you paint something on the front?” and walked away.

When I came back this is the abstract that he’d painted. We both loved it and then I sort of picked up the colors and finished it off.

It’s a little different, with a more contemporary feel. I like the fact that the inside of the drawer is this lovely bright orange. The painting is done in such a way that it’ll gradually age and get that shabby artsy look.

This little table got us excited about doing lots more…. and somehow we started to find more and more bits and pieces of old furniture to work on. We’ve actually been stockpiling it I’m afraid to say. And as we can get to each piece, we’ve been having some creative fun renewing them.