Kitchen Clock

Finding living space for Sonia in our tiny pad was well and good but, there was an aspect of perilous psycho trauma regarding the configuration of the apartment mandating that she had to sleep in the kitchen. If I close my eyes and listen very hard, I can almost hear the therapy sessions. In order to mitigate the possibility of my child's self esteem being destroyed by her being relegated to sleep in that which is truly not often considered a room for sleeping, I told her to pick the colors for the kitchen as if it were her bed room. She ran with the colors in the clock and the wall behind it. The kitchen was painted that year as one of her Christmas presents. The clock began life as a couple of pieces of 3/4" birch plywood. I had just bought a new hole saw set and wanted to take it for a spin, so to speak. In drafting directly on to the plywood, I drew on a number of different inspirations. I've always been drawn to the cleanliness of Art Deco geometry and how it handles it's relationships with large, simplified shapes. When you study it from that perspective, it really is a celebration of circles and triangles. I've always gotten an enormous kick out of the humorous evolution of Art Deco into the 1950's space aged promise of the future. Flash Gordon meets Raymond Lowe. How many lighting fixtures from that time look like stars. How many appliances looked like rocket ship parts? Lastly at the time, I was just discovering the mid 19th century Biediermeier furniture style which often mixed light veneers contrasted by dark lacquer. In it's first iteration the clock hung on a white wall. The blue was sprayed gloss black. The orange was Mahogany and the clocks ring was black. In the clocks current chroma, it more closely resembles Gulf Oil's racing livery.