Interview with Plastikcomb Magazine #8, 2024 | interviewed by Aaron Beebe

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PCM: Your portfolio is truly remarkable, spanning a wide array of creative endeavors. Naturally, we're intrigued by your deep passion for various forms of art and design, including music. Let's delve into the journey behind it all! Could you share a bit about your upbringing? Did you grow up in a household that nurtured creativity? Was there a particular moment in your childhood that ignited your enthusiasm for artistic pursuits?

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CF: Thanks so much! Yeah, I have to say I was really fortunate to be a part of a family that totally nurtured and supported creativity and curiosity, and pretty much all of whom were creative in their own ways. Huge credit goes to my parents. My dad taught me craft, in the truest sense, being that he was great at building things, from detailed boat and airplane models, to anything around the house, to his 13ft. wooden surfboard that he built in the late-1940s when he was a young lifeguard in Virginia Beach. He was also a naturally gifted photographer, although he never considered himself one, he just had a natural eye for composition and 'moment'. And my mom taught me how to see, having had lots of visual stimuli in the house growing up with her amazing collections and objects that she decorated with; rock specimens, sea shells, various antique pieces, all these great eclectic hand-selected objects. And tons of books, on every subject. She was always pointing things out, too, the design and color of things, the inherent natural beauty in all of these things, in life. Along with also being taught, inspired and supported by my two older brothers and older sister, who are artists/creative in their own ways as well. I think that collective visual and cross-disciplinary 'immersion' definitely had an effect on my overall enthusiasm and creative pursuits.

 

Wow, your upbringing sounds fascinating! So being surrounded by such creativity inspired you to embark on a creative path from a young age? You mentioned growing up in Virginia Beach, were you deeply involved in the skate and surf culture of the early 80s? How much did this influence and shape your identity as an artist and designer up to now? Did you pursue any formal education in the field, or did you envision a completely different career path for yourself? As a child, I often heard the saying that 'the world always needs ditch diggers.' Did you ever consider pursuing a career outside of the creative realm?

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Yeah, there was always something to be inspired by growing up. Lots of cool books around the house, and just looking up to my older brothers and sister who were into art and cool music and cool things. I was doodling and drawing and making things from a really young age. I recall being into "typography" when I was first learning how to formally print and I would try to get all designy with the letters and numbers. So yeah, I think I was on a 'creative' path pretty early on, and just drawing and doodling and appreciating artistic "expression" in a formative sense. Even to the point of "doodling" (with a sharp object) on my mom's antique piano. Sorry, mom. haha.

 

Yeah, beach life, surfing, and more so skateboarding for me, was an integral part of growing up, for sure. Our family was big into the beach - my dad used to surf, in fact, he was one of the area's early surfer/lifeguards, and figures into the post-war Virginia Beach history. (Actually, my brother Stewart wrote an amazing article for the magazine, Surfer's Journal a while back about the history of VB and East Coast surfing. Pretty cool.) But yeah, 70's/80's surf/skate culture via my brothers, and then getting totally into skating in the early-80's and being fully immersed in all aspects of creativity of that. And from an artistic standpoint, especially the board graphics of V.C. Johnson and the aesthetics of Craig Stecyk's art direction and design for Powell-Peralta. Spent hours trying to draw like Johnson. "Trying" being the operative word there! Yeah, that golden age of 80's-early-90's skateboard culture and aesthetics definitely had an impact.

 

As far as ever considering taking a career path outside of the creative fields, no, that never was even a thought. I mean, sure, I've had jobs over the years that were momentarily necessary and uncreative, and in those times I wondered if I should be doing something different. But no, I never pursued a "non-creative" field. But I guess one can 'make' any field creative if you try hard enough. haha! Funny, I keep thinking of that scene from the movie Say Anything where John Cusak's character Lloyd is over at his new girlfriend's house for dinner for the first time, and her dad is sort of asking him about what his plans are for the future, and that whole speech Lloyd does -  "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, ...or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. ...As a career, I don't want to do that. ..."  Dobblerism to the max. haha!

 

Ha! Lloyd is great! I wonder how kickboxing turned out for him? They say it's the sport of the future, you know?

 

You could say he got a...kick out of it. -har-har.

 

I recall hearing somewhere that you were briefly sponsored as a skater. Is that true?

 

That is true, but it's not all that newsworthy. haha. I was briefly sponsored by a local skate shop when I was 14/15, and although I took the creative act of skateboarding seriously, I never took the idea of contests seriously enough and ended up bailing on sponsored life. It was fun though.

 

You mentioned being into typography when you were younger, which had a significant impact on your journey through the '90s and into your early adulthood. You were already collaborating with David Carson and getting your visuals printed in Raygun Magazine and his book "The End of Print" must have been influential. Who else shaped your artistic path during that time?

 

My brother Stewart was always into really cool music, all of my siblings were, but Stewart was in punk/post punk bands, played guitar, and just was dialed into a lot of cool music stuff, especially living in NYC. So when he turned me on to the label 4AD and Vaughan Oliver's graphic design work for them, my world was blown apart, in the best possible way. Vaughan's and Chris Bigg's and photographer Simon Larbalestier's collective aesthetic vision had, and STILL has, a gravitational pull that is inescapable for me, as it does for so many others who love their work. 4AD as a gestalt - musically and visually, was seismic in its influence for me. So to have Chris Bigg doing the layout design for this interview is beyond mind-blowing!

 

Your brother Stewart was quite the accomplished travel photographer, living in NYC. Did his presence there influence your decision to move to Manhattan? Your immersion in photography, including your contracts with major stock agencies, played a significant role in your life during that period. Did it profoundly shape your artistic perspective, or was it primarily a means of making ends meet?

 

Yeah, Stewart being in New York was pretty much the main pull for me. I was looking at colleges up there during high school, wanting to go to Pratt or Parsons or Cooper Union even, and my late aunt (Ann Ferebee), who also lived in NYC since the 1950's, was pushing me to get up there for college too. She was really neat, was an architecture and design journalist early on. She interviewed Charles Eames in the late-50s, was friends with Milton Glasser and all the Push Pin Studio guys, knew Andy Warhol and all these other amazing art/design/architecture icons. She taught design history at Pratt for a number of years, so I was looking into that in addition to other universities. But that direction didn't quite pan out at the time and it wasn't until the mid-90s, after being signed on to two stock photo agencies, Photoinca and Graphistock, that I started really focusing on moving up there. As you mentioned, these were two of the biggest, artistically innovative, stock photo agencies at the time, and another link back to Stewart, he was represented by them and had gotten me hooked up with them as well. So that platform of the stock agencies really opened a very creative time for me too, artistically/photographically. And at that time, pre-internet, stock photography agencies would publish quarterly catalogs, and Photonica, which was based out of Japan, put together really beautiful catalogs with very selective, unique and serious photography, which pushed me to be even that much more creative. So yeah, that was another formative element in my creative growth.

 

How did the city itself inspire your creative endeavors?

 

Man, that whole time up there, from mid-90s to early 2000s, mainly pre-9/11, was an incredible time to be there, as I'm sure you recall. The internet was still in its early years, exciting things were happening, and it really felt like anything was possible. It really was in the air. It's almost like the last of an era of true optimism. It was amazing! It was amazing because it was new (to me), exploring a new city, new art, design, architecture, new people...the "pulse" of it all. Which is not unique for someone experiencing NYC for the first time, but using all that to educate and update your creative scope was the goal. And being exposed to the highest examples of art and design and fashion and architecture, culture at large, only goes to expedite that education. From high culture to low-brow absurdities and everything in between. It's all there to be inspired by. But the overall feeling of that time was of true optimism, anything was possible.  

 

What was one of the craziest moments from your time in the Lower East Side?

 

Well, one that comes to mind right off was that time you and I heard that person fall out of a 5th-story window across the street from my apartment, seeing that unfold, watching from the roof of my building was pretty grizzly. And on the lighter side, when Chuck Close ran over my foot with his wheelchair coming out of his studio. Nutty times up there.

 

Can you recall the pivotal moment when you decided to venture into furniture design? What was the first design of yours that actually came to fruition?

 

I've had an appreciation for industrial design - cool designed objects, cars, etc. for a long time, but I think I really started to have a serious interest in furniture design in the early-mid-90s when I was getting into buying/selling/collecting vintage stuff and focusing on mid-century modern design. Then going into business with good friend and mentor Ronn Ives and his shop at the time, Futures Antiques, was a fast-track into that world. Educating myself on modernist design really opened the floodgates on appreciating all that, especially first learning about the Eames' studio and their holistic approach to art and design. And then on the contemporary end of the design spectrum, when I first became aware of the Australian designer Marc Newson, he quickly became one of my design heroes. Around that time, 1995/96, I was sort of sketching ideas for chairs and coffee tables but it wouldn't be until a couple years after I moved up to NYC, 1998 or so, that I would really start to hit on a few designs that I thought were worth pursuing. I was approaching some of these furniture concepts from two directions - one set of designs were very clean, minimal, coming out of the the modernist canon in terms of design language, made from higher-end materials (rosewood veneers, walnut, turned aluminum hardware), with an emphasis on visually striking forms. And the other set of concepts were based on reinterpreting readymade objects and/or utilizing unusual materials in unique ways. It was one of these 'readymade' concepts that would be the first design that I actually made. The piece was called the Low-Tek Table, a coffee table made from 'clamshell-ing' two industrial molded composite wood pallets together and had a rectangular glass top. The pallets sort of resembled a giant egg carton the way the legs undulated and extruded out of its surface, and the surface itself, the whole pallet, was molded pulverized wood chips. So the overall look of the table was something that was both raw and industrial and yet organic and natural at the same time. It really looked like something from the distant past and something from the future. Like the Aztecs meet Blade Runner.

 

It appears that your Hive has gained the most notoriety, being part of the Carnegie Museum of Art's permanent collection, and let's not forget it graces Will Ferrell's penthouse in NYC, among other accolades for its beautiful design. Is it your favorite piece, or do you have other designs that brought you the most satisfaction? Also, what's the most outrageous idea you've ever entertained?

 

Yeah, I'd say the Hive is my favorite piece, but the Hollow Table is a real close second. The Hollow Table was also the first of that particular series of pieces that was made. So in this series (called the 2000 Series), which I launched in 2000 at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in NYC, was the Hive Shelving Unit, the Hollow Table and the One Cabinet. They were shown along with three pieces from the 'readymade' series (called the NewForm Series).

 

As far as the most outrageous idea...I'm not sure. I didn't get too nutty with the ideas, I tried to keep them within the bounds of manufacturability and practicality. There were a couple wacky conceptual things, like reinterpreting iconic designs, like the classic Thonet bentwood cafe chair, having it be made out of carbon fiber or some other balatanly 'modern' material. That whole dichotomy of old meets new. There was another concept series I wanted to do in the early 2000s which was based on this series of pieces that this Dutch designer, Maarten Baas did, where he took all these classic modernist icon furniture pieces like Gerrit Rietveld's Zig Zag chair, the Eames folding screen, Wooden chair by Marc Newson, Favela chair by Campana brothers, and other mega iconic pieces, and set them on fire. And the charred remains of the pieces were then sold as limited edition gallery/museum pieces. Like...??? I was a big fan of Baas' work at the time but I just thought this was the most elitist First World endeavor. A total eye-rolling postmodernist exercise. So my concept, called 'Restorations', was to "restore" the subverted pieces back to their original condition. So yeah....take THAT, Maartin Baas. ........ -cough- .....

 

Are you feeling ok? You might want to get that cough checked out…-cough-…

 

haha!

 

As you mentioned, you were not only into furniture design but also buying and selling vintage items. You even opened a store in the city for this purpose, right? Were you featuring your own furniture in the store? Did you make connections through the store that helped advance your art and design career?

 

Yeah. Well, the store already existed. It was this cool little mid-century shop that I ran across right when I first moved to NYC and stumbled onto when I was just cruising around the East Village where I was living. But yeah, after a while I was consigning vintage pieces through the shop that I was finding on a regular basis, especially on road trips back home to Virginia. At that time, from 1998 to about 2002, the owner and I struck up a really great friendship, then a relationship and eventually she and I ended up going into business together and launched the furniture pieces mentioned earlier. It was a really great little shop, situated right around the corner from the Cooper Union and Union Sq, across the street from the classic Kiev diner, down the street from McSorley's (the 'oldest still-running bar in NYC'), so there was an eclectic mix of great foot traffic on the block. From art and design collectors, to design-savvy celebrities, to students and neighborhood locals just popping in to look - it was a great showcase and launchpad for the furniture and art.

 

Beyond your impressive photography and furniture design, you have an amazing body of work that includes assemblage, collage, graphic design, branding, painting, film, and typographic experimentation. Do you have a specific process for creating your works, or is it more of a spontaneous approach?

 

Thanks! 

Yeah, it really just depends on what I'm working on. Sometimes it'll be very spontaneous, working intuitively, following an impression of an idea and seeing where it goes. But other times I'll dig into doing a good bit of research on the subject, whatever that might be (graphics, guitar/amp design, typography, logo design, color theory, whatever...). Or depending on the project, it might have a bit of market research ahead of it, to see what else is out there so that I don't do anything similar or just to gauge the competition, etc. I've mentioned this before but often I'm working on simultaneous projects, so there are times where an idea that I'm working on for one thing will inform an idea for another thing. For example, a graphic design project or some element of typography might inspire a shape to use for a product design project, or some material that I'd been using for some artwork might inspire a use for it in a furniture piece, and a furniture piece might inspire a design for a guitar amplifier. Essentially a design cross-pollination effect, whether intended or unintended.

 

Who are your major influences, past, present, and future?

 

Oh man, lots. For an overall design approach, without question, Charles and Ray Eames - from furniture design to graphics to photography and film, their full immersion approach had it all. Dieter Rams and his work for Braun and that beautifully pared-down-to-essentials, reductionist approach, and his overall design ethos. And, as previously mentioned, Marc Newson, who was a big influence on my furniture design early on. There's so many great designers I love, but those are some of the ones that really stand out for me as true markers of influence. As far as graphic design, Dutch icon Piet Zwart, mid-century greats Herbert Matter, Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand, then on up to the biggest for me, Vaughan Oliver & Chris Bigg of V23/4AD. Of the visual/conceptual artists, Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys, Donald Judd, Basquiat ...I'm sure I'm leaving a bunch out, but those were essential go-to's for me. All of these I'm forever indebted to for their inspiration and influence. Currently there's so much stuff out there to sift through and appreciate I can't keep up. Lots of really great stuff,...lots of dumb ass shit too. But that goes with the territory in any time.

 

Isn’t it all subjective? Ok…yeah, there is a lot of shit out there, and in some cases literal! For instance, in 2016, one of Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s 1961 cans of "Artist’s Shit" sold for €275,000 at a Sotheby’s auction.

 

With a protracted sigh and eyes rolling, I'll just say there's a sucker born everyday. That's the only problem about Duchamp opening the proverbial Pandora's Box with the artist's annunciation of the readymade, and conceptual art writ large, it begat the unending pantheon of postmodernist absurdities like said can of shat. I forgot who said it, maybe Marshall McLuhan, but it's basically, "Art is anything you can get away with." His point being that art is whatever the current culture allows to be called "art". Apparently modern culture gives a wide berth to a whole heck of a lot of shit. But as they say, shit is in the eye of the beholder. And the monied collector, too, apparently.

 

It looks as though your latest creative pursuit involves designing guitars, amps, and pedals. I know music has influenced you from an early age, but what inspired you to get into the design aspect of it and create Futura Guitars? Was there a moment when you thought, "It would be cool if this pickup looked like this," or "How fun would it be to create a pedal with this design?"

 

Yeah, I've always loved cool guitars, and really becoming conscious of them when I first got one in high school and having friends in bands. Even before that when my brother had his guitars around the house when he was getting into playing and being in bands in the early 80s. But I guess it was really when I moved up to NYC and started playing guitar again that I started looking at different ones and appreciating the design, especially of a lot of the cool vintage guitars. I just started to draw a few design ideas I had for what my dream guitar would be if I could have one made, which were pretty much just derivative of some of the classic Gretsch guitars that I really liked. But those designs ended up just sitting around and sort of forgotten about. Then in 2013 or so I started getting back into playing guitar (again) and started messing around with some more designs. This time I really started getting into it and over the next few years with a number of designs kicking around I started to try to hit up some guitar companies, connecting with people on the inside via LinkedIn. I ended up making some pretty cool connections that way. My first foray into having an actual guitar design being put into production was with this company called Eastwood Guitars in 2017. From then on I was hooked on the idea of really pursuing guitar design as a thing to 'do', and that's what Futura Guitars was sort of born out of. It began as an imaginary guitar brand that ended up becoming a design and rendering studio, providing guitar, amplifier, pedal design and rendering services, as well as graphic and logo design for the music / guitar builder trade.

 

You’ve been playing music for a while now. Who are your musical influences? Are you interested in pursuing a professional music career, perhaps composing film scores or creating instrumental pieces for commercial use?

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So a few of my core favorite musicians/bands are Dif Juz, Cocteau Twins, Vini Reilly/Durutti Column, Pell Mell, The Chameleons, Brian Eno, Bill Frisell, Johnny Marr, Tortoise and Tommy Guerrero to name a few. But there's a lot that filters in to color my 'sonic aesthetic', from post punk stuff, surf and jazz, to dub, impressionist classical, ambient and experimental, to 70s AM classics to field recordings and sound edits. As far as a musical career, I'm nowhere near being a professional musician, but I have entertained that pipe dream idea of creating some type of 'soundtrack' to something, a short film, video or art piece. I definitely want to pursue a release of some of my songs, whether as a digital release or as a limited edition vinyl thing. We'll see how that all plays out. In the meantime, I've just been throwing some of the songs up on my website.

 

Speaking of music, you love collecting album covers and wonderfully designed thermoses (I never thought I’d be writing and verifying the plural of thermos). Where does this urge come from? You mentioned that your mom loved collecting eclectic objects—could this be linked to your childhood? Or do you feel a need to preserve these historical artifacts from a time when things were designed with a lot more consideration?

 

That's a good question. I like the idea of preserving interesting examples of objects from another time, for the appreciation of the design/concept and said time, but as far as the thermoses, I think it's really just something that tweaks me on a visual level. That was one of those things that sort of came out of the blue. I think I found my first thermos when you and I were hitting some of our local thrift stores in '94 or '95. It was this green "Holiday" brand thermos with this very sleek and cool mid-century logo and graphic bits, just grabbed it because it was just so cool. But it wasn't until I randomly found another vintage thermos that I consciously started 'looking' for them. It was when I had about 5 or 6 or so, seeing them all together, the great colors and patterns and logos, that I was like...Ok, I'm going to 'collect' these now. Thus began that weird and nerdy obsession that has sort of ebbed and flowed for the past 30-some years. I always think of that song that Steve Martin sings in The Jerk - "Ohh, I'm picking out a thermos for youuu....". haha! But as you mentioned, it very well could have that link to childhood interests in the collecting of things.

 

As far as the album covers, that was sort of the same situation too, just picking up ones with cool graphics here and there, thrift stores, yard sales etc. Then learning about the artists, illustrators and designers behind the covers,...and that's when the mild collecting obsession kicked in.

 

Would you like to add anything or promote something to our audience?

 

Well,...not explicitly. I'm always working on something new, always open to art and design commissions, collaborations, etc. But as far as promoting anything, I would just say as artists and creative people, we all should promote something positive to the art world and the creative process. The art world, and culture at large, seems so dark and dysfunctional far too often, especially these days, that a new shift in attitude and perspective is in order. A new 'enlightenment' almost. I mean, you need a healthy balance of the dark and light, but it's been dark for way too long. It's become cliched, almost a 'canon of proportion' of commodifiable bleakness. We need to bring the positive light back. That's what I would promote.

 

When is Styrofoam Mansions going on tour?

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haha! Yeah, I'm opening for Yani at the Acropolis with GWAR as my backing band, and cameos by John Tesh and the former claves player from Korn. Rawwwk!!  (.....wtf?)

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