Bio:
Greg Klassen was born in Reedley, California in 1981 and raised as the son of peach farmers. Having later studied woodworking on the rugged north coast of California at the Krenov School and at Capellagården on the island of Öland, Sweden, his love of the water grew tremendously. Greg’s earliest body of work included sculpted wood furniture with organic forms. His 2008 introduction to a local sawyer saw-milling live edge wood slabs changed the course of his work as he found new inspiration in the wood’s most natural and curvaceous forms. Greg’s most recent work, titled “River Collection,” is an on-going series of tables and wall-hangings inspired by water. The unlikely marriage of live edge wood and hand-cut blue glass serves to express Greg’s fascination with rivers, lakes, oceans, and shorelines.
Greg’s work has been exhibited nationally at the Smithsonian Craft Show and the Sculpture Objects and Functional Art and Design (SOFA). His work has been collected by patrons from around the globe and he divides his time equally between creating speculative work and commission work.
Greg has also trained in Biblical Theology and enjoys serving in the children’s ministry in his local church family. Together with his wife, Barb, they homeschool their three children and cherishes the freedom they have to go on travel adventures to national parks in their motorhome. Greg lives and works from his self-built studio in Everson, Washington, surrounded by mountains, glacier-fed rivers, and the San Juan Island archipelago.
Statement:
My excitement for nature is what pushes me to create. I’ve traveled all over North America in pursuit of inspiration, visiting national parks and scenic byways from coast to coast in search of rivers, glacier-fed lakes, and waterfalls to find impressions that will later guide my work. Visits to Athabasca Falls in Alberta, the Snake River in Wyoming, Lake Powell in Nevada, and the rugged coast of Maine’s Acadia National Park are just some of the places that have filled me with inspiration. My impressions from these places are re-discovered in the natural forms of live edge wood, burls, and slabs that remind me of these places and from which I create tables of all sizes as well as wall-hung art pieces. I work exclusively with live edge woods like big leaf maple and claro walnut. These curvy pieces of wood give me an ever-changing pallet of shapes, bumps, and textures with which to play and draw upon the memories of rivers and shorelines I’ve visited. I often visit sawmills to look through dozens of wood slabs before finding one or two that provide sufficient inspiration to create one of my water-inspired tables or wall-hangings. The carefully chosen wood slabs play the part of the land and the water is represented by an aqua colored glass that is manipulated into rivers, lakes, and oceans through a painstaking process of hand-cutting. The blue glass provides the feeling of water and its translucence properties allow you to imagine and explore what lies beneath the surface, with textures created by burls and bark edges. My entire process is done by hand, from flattening the wood, exposing the natural edges, cutting and inlaying the glass. My river tables can best be described as “functional art” and my wall-hangings, while not functional, serve to point the viewer’s mind to the many beautiful places in nature where I’ve found my inspiration.
www.gregklassen.com
