Woodworker Ray Bock is VIVA’s April Guest Artist!

A few fun questions!

How did you come to focus on your current subject?

I started out doing custom furniture and found that downsizing to boxes allowed me to do more pieces and do things that are structurally not possible with larger pieces

Who or what has strongly influenced your work?

Modernist architects and abstract painters and sculptors - particularly Donald Judd.

If you could have one work of art in your home from a museum or private collection, what would it be?

James Turrell’s Twilight Epihany. Actually, it won’t fit in my house but it will go nicely on my land. In the house, I would be pretty happy with an Olivia Faire piece of furniture.

Why did you decide to work in your chosen medium?

I studied photography in school but also took many design and shop courses. I did photography for a long time and eventually moved into wood when photography became digitized.

What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?

A tablesaw.

How do you know when a piece of work is finished?

I do pretty detailed drawings or sketches and then produce the piece from there. I may tweak it a little or do variations along the way but its pretty much all decided in the design stage.

From where do you draw your inspiration?

see above

What does your studio look like?

Studio looks like total chaos to anybody but me. I know where almost everything is though.

Ray Bock, a short history...

From 1976 to 1981, I studied design and photography at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I graduated with a BA in Design.

I worked in commercial photography from 1980 to 1991, first as a photographer’s assistant at Hedrich-Blessing and second as the manager of the dye transfer printing department at a commercial photo lab. What's dye transfer printing? It’s an antiquated, complicated, messy way of disassembling a color transparency and reassembling it into a color print.

While in the photo biz, I had been doing furniture making as a serious hobby. As digital imaging became a serious threat to my livelihood as a printer, I began to look to woodworking/furniture making as a new occupation.

In 1991, my wife and I bought an old farm outside of Viroqua  Wisconsin. We left our jobs in Chicago in 1992, moved to Viroqua and set about getting the new house, barn and land under control. 29 years later, I can proudly say that it is still out of control.

From 1994 to present, I exhibited and sold work at a number of national art/craft festivals. Some of the more notable ones were the American Craft Council Baltimore and St Paul shows, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, the St Louis Art Festival, the Milwaukee Lakefront Museum of Art Festival of Arts, the Cherry Creek Festival of Arts in Denver, the Des Moines Festival of Arts, and most recently, the Smithsonian craft show.

I also have sold and exhibited at a number of galleries throughout the U.S.

From 1992 to 2008, I designed / made custom and limited production wood furniture.

Since 2008, I have been making small, architecturally inspired boxes in exotic and figured solid woods and veneers.  I also have a line of elegant elliptical hardwood and veneer bowls.