Stacks Image 3
My "Serengeti” is made from a series of very thin slices of Zebrawood. It began as a piece of fractured Zebrawood end grain. Like most of the wood I use in my wall artwork it was a cutoff from a local furniture company. It was a small piece of wood with really interesting patterns. Also very broken. Once I settled in on what I wanted to do the process to get it there and still have my fingers began. I began by reassembling the end piece so I could resaw it to get enough thin sections for the width I was looking for. This worked until it didn't and some of the uncooperative pieces started breaking apart even more while resawing. I had to keep reassembling and resawing them. I eventually got all the pieces that I was looking for. The pieces were at this point very fragile and not square. On to the frame.

The frame is figured Maple with an outside and inside band of Peruvian Walnut for an accent. To add depth to the finished piece the frame is also beveled at about 5º. I had to design and construct the frame before assembling the final Zebrawood pattern since something had to be square. Once the frame was completed the interesting part started. The were still many small fractures in the Zebrawood. The squaring and pattern matching was finally done with tape, a specially made jig, a very sharp plane and a straight edge. Each individual piece was pressed together with tape on one side, shaped and then added to the other assembled pieces in the frame. As shown above it eventually worked out.

The Serengeti is currently NSF and I may never sell it. In 2016 we used a high definition large art scanner to image it and issue Giclee prints. The prints are very high quality archival process prints. Many people have thought they are real wood. The signed and numbered prints are currently available for sale.