private collection
A National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988 gave me an opportunity to study traditional marquetry in Paris. One of the things I hoped to learn was the way classical marquetry would be cut for repeated motifs. This is something I had seen in the work of Riesener (XXXXX). The tools for accomplishing this is the chevalet, which allows packets of veneers to be saw accurately.
When I got home we built a chevalet (XXXXX). Formication was the first piece we did using the tool. The motif was a simple figure/ground relationship. red ants from Brazilwood were cut into curly maple. There are 108 identical rectangles that have the ants marching either left or right.
The name Formication comes from the Latin word for ant, formica. I rather liked how at first glance the reader might think the word is fornication…