Eric Guy: Blending Woodworking into an Art Form
Eric Guy is an artist and picker—an academic picker, a mental picker, and a materials picker. He rifles through magazines for design inspiration or technique, then he picks up his craftsman’s tools. “Then I feel like I have to explore and create a perspective that’s my own,” he says. “I’m a designer. I’m a creator. That’s my forte.”
If not his own design, Guy’s background and knowledge allow him to reproduce furniture from any era he chooses—the 12th century to present. Always attracted to fine arts, he remembers trips to the Louvre Museum as a youngster with his grandfather, Henry Fauconnet.
Fauconnet, a successful decorator in Paris after World War II, would bring him to the La Bastille quarter in the 12 Arrondissement of Paris, an area where most of the highend, skilled craftsmen were centered, including the acclaimed French school of André-Charles Boulle, plus fine furniture makers, wood guilders, and upholsterers.
“Now it’s gone, it’s all gone,” Guy says. “Craftsmen moved to the countryside where rents were less expensive.” but also make you comfortable.” “Modern” can employ various materials, even Kevlar and polymers, and though often utilizing a mixed media, the initial materials remain natural, say a live-edge plank.
“You just design to give a feel of dimension, but the polymers also add a layer of protection, definition, and endurance,” Guy says. The white-polymer-edged slab table and bench in his studio in late winter was a very dry walnut—the most important trait—without imperfections. Once a project starts, he sources materials. “There’s no reason to go to Mexico to buy walnut,” he says. “Everything should be here.”
Occasionally, his pieces are on display in Springtown. Currently he focuses on custom creations, although during the 90s, when the market was up, he took on plenty of antique restoration pieces. “If you do not know the source of the piece, you can guess, but for restorers and cabinet makers who have that knowledge, they’re specialists and academics,” he says.
For his own place in history, he isn’t looking for fame. He merely wants to continue honing his craft and for someone who may buy one of my pieces, signed with a brass plaque, maybe then to be known as the “Guy” who designed and crafted it.
Mostly, his clients are interested in fresh new, trendy designs, even if just to show friends. Some of his work may even classify as environmental modern because of its natural basis. “It’s the niche of now,” Guy says. “Pieces I create here go into fine houses. This is a very nice area. I try all the time to find new doors as a designer and a businessman. That’s life. You can never stop. If there’s a mountain to climb, climb it. Go to the sun. There’s always something on the other side.”
ERIC GUY INC
3201 ROUTE 212
SPRINGTOWN
267.372.8138
