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Designs for curve-conscious décor

Montreal-based artist Colin Schleeh is a self-described 'aesthetic scientist.' His undulating designs celebrate the beauty of nature's imperfection

By MELANIE CHAMBERS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Saturday, August 9, 2003 - Page L6

When the Alberta government rejected five of his prototype gifts to international dignitaries, in a tongue-and-cheek gesture, wood designer Colin Schleeh suggested something made from compressed buffalo dung. But he was only half-joking.

"I was trying to be less regional, less beaver-pelt in my thinking. We are a global community after all --what if Michael Angelo only used paints from Sienna? Wouldn't it be great if the calibre of Canadian designs came from materials all over the world and not yet another beaver-pelt fable?"

The 48-year-old Montreal wood designer will rip materials apart, burn or microwave wood or rot it. "I'd like to consider myself an aesthetic scientist, I disregard good or bad, right or wrong and try to leave myself open to phenomena. Then I have a wider palette."

Tucked in his studio's shelves and cupboards, dozens of unfinished creations wait for the right design. What looks like a cross-section of a tree is actually a thin sliver of a phone book -- swirling stripes of yellow, blue government and even white pages are locked in place with epoxy.

On top of a saw-dusted shelf, there's a strip of a tire. With the black tread peeled back, the steel wires stick, out and up, like tentacles. Taken out of context, and off a Chicago highway, the tire is now venerable.

Schleeh has set up shop in an outwardly derelict warehouse. It overlooks a graffiti-painted building on the banks of the Lachine Canal in Montreal . His mainstay and trademark item -- rippling wooden vases resembling a clutch bag -- have made their way to the likes of Barneys in New York , the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Vancouver Art Gallery , the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum . "I can make something so deliciously thin and elegant and waterproof out of wood," he says.

accomplished cabinetmaker who trained in Germany at the Berufs und Fachschule fur das Holz und Kunstgewerbe in Stuttgart and apprenticed in Alberta at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton . As a journeyman, he worked as a boat builder, a set designer, and a manager of a few custom furniture companies. Later at Dawson College in Montreal , Schleeh managed the woodworking, fine art and interior design studios.

Two years ago, Schleeh teamed up with Rachel Schwartz, his business partner, promoter and front woman for Schleeh Design. The arrangement gave him more time for creative expression. "She's the pragmatist, I'm the romantic," he muses.

And only a romantic can see potential beauty in a dead piece of wood. One of Schleeh's favourite materials is rotting wood. Water bacterium, which causes decay, creates tiny black lines that resemble an etching.

After the Manitoba flood several years ago, a company wanted to thank its employees and enlisted Schleeh to create a piece of commemorative art. Determined not to churn out yet another souvenir shop piece of Canadiana, he made plaques cut from the weathered wood. The rationale was that instead of representing water as something destructive as it was in the flood, he took an optimist's approach as if to say, "Look at what wonderful things water can do."