Furniture as art

Palmer resident Jess Crow makes furniture. Right now, she’s making bright, colorful pieces that go beyond the standard “river tables” seen all over social media. Crow doesn’t want to do what everyone else does. “I’m keeping my designs different than everybody else’s; not a lot of people are incorporating the very raw edge,” she said. “They're doing bookended — they take the slabs and then they fold them inside, and then you have the live edge on the inside, and then that's where they're pouring those rivers.”

She makes desktop art out of wood, too, but not the popular shabby-chic, rustic stuff that everyone else is making. “I have a lot of customers right now who are wanting desktop elements, so I'm taking a section of slab, say maybe only this big, you know, 14 inches by anywhere,” she said. “It's maybe a burl. So, it's what normally people would throw away, or turn into kindling, I'm taking that and adding art to it, or their logos, and their company names, and they're putting them on their desks.”

This lets Crow be more artistic with her pieces. “It allows me the freedom to do the girly element and bring color into situations where maybe there would not be,” she said. “Like in a construction office.”

It’s not all about the money, she says. Crow donates more pieces than she sells. Still, there’s a reason she’s so passionate about her work. “I enjoy it, and I want my daughters to see that they don't have to stay within traditional means to support themselves,” she said. “They don't have to stay structured into any sort of, ‘this is a man's world, this is a woman's world.’”

Also, she said, you don’t have to wear a bathing suit to get people to show interest in your work. Surprisingly, lots of people in her business use scantily-clad women to get followers. “For instance, on Instagram, you have women who have 30,000 followers, and they're sanding a table in a bikini.”

These are actual artisans? “I have yet to determine that,” she joked. “There are some legit ones out there. There really, truly are. But the ones that have the mass followings, and who are getting sponsorships from bigger things, and a couple of them even said, ‘My photos are all staged,’ and I'm like, ‘That's rather peculiar, but okay.’”

Crow brings all that back around to her children, all young women and teens.

“It’s super important to me that they see that, I mean, as cliché as it is, that you really can do almost anything,” she said. “You might not do it as well, and you might not do it as the pace that somebody else wants you to do it, but you can still do it.”

Being self-sufficient is important to a woman who left home (a cabin out by Haystack Mountain in Fairbanks) at the age of 14. “In a field dominated by men, I get a lot of opinions,” she said. “I’ve been called the cutest delivery girl ever, as I'm standing at the hardware counter. And, you're lucky you're a cute old man, because that's really insulting.”

Crow is quick to point out that she doesn’t do it alone.

“I have a great team,” she said. “I have two employees that help me with the heavy lifting. Some of this stuff, I absolutely cannot. And I understand and respect that. I just can't lift the same thing that you could. I don't have enough muscle and enough meat behind me to do it. It's just the way it is.”

Still, some people give her grief for that. “That's actually been a struggle, because a lot of people look at it like, well if you have somebody helping you, then you're not doing it,” she said. “But you would never say that to a man.”

“I absolutely do have guys that come in and help me,” she said. “I am not ashamed of that, and I need their help and their support; they are my best friends. It's no different than a buddy calling over his guys because he's lifting his truck and he needs help getting the engine out. It's still his truck, it's still his work.”

She also absolutely has guys come in for her brightly colored work. “I have as many guys wanting these exceptionally bright, rainbow colored tables,” she said. “And I just did a piece for a guy yesterday, a burl — and it'll stand about this high, and it is those bright rainbow colors. And he's an avid outdoorsman and hunter, and he wants this rainbow colored burl, in his room.”

Before Crow made furniture, she was a beader. Of course, not just a beader, but one with pieces displayed at Cuddy Hall in Anchorage and with photos published in national magazines. “Betty Cuddy bought my very first piece and it's on display at Cuddy Hall,” she said. “Not a lot of people know that because I don't tell anybody.”

Her first piece of furniture was a coffee table for her own bedroom, but didn’t like the way it looked in there. Crow sold it on Craigslist, and ended up with 50 people wanting one. “It was just a pallet table, just like everybody else was doing, but I put my spin on it with paint,” she said. “And it was extremely popular. So, I ended up staying up until midnight for the next month, making a bunch of these coffee tables.”

Making furniture allows Crow a lot more freedom than the smaller scale stuff like wine holders and bathtub trays, which she also produces. “I like doing stuff with my hands that's challenging,” she said. “And learning. And building furniture is very, very challenging.”

Crow’s most recent challenge was a table she did in conjunction with Alaska Picker, a unique antique store in Palmer. “That table was a six-foot by 42-inch table with custom cast iron legs,” she said, proudly. “It was a huge table. It was actually a lady who purchased it, and it was just delivered last weekend. The woman who bought it wanted this to be her heirloom piece for her children to pass down to their children. And that was a pretty big honor, because it had a lot of meaning to her. She actually used it to represent her mother, who had passed away.”

Sometimes the challenge is in outdoing herself. “So, my last set was doing watercolors on wood, and figuring out how to do that,” she said. “And nobody here was really doing that. I had a client come to me who wanted a whale galaxy bed. That was all she wanted. Those were her only requirements. It had to be a whale, it had to have a galaxy, and well, actually it had to light up. That was it. She gave me free rein on everything else. And those are the best kind of clients.”

“I really wanted it to be special and bright for her,” Crow continued. “And I knew that my water color technique, while it looked very cool, would not fulfill what I wanted it to do. So, I spent the next almost year trying to develop a method that brought exceptionally bright colors into wood. So, after thousands of dollars wasted, lumbers, and paint, and this is very much research and development, I figured out a way to bring the vibrancy of a mix of acrylics and alcohol inks and resin, to wood, and keep them stable.”

The next step was getting those colors to stay where she wanted them to stay, because wood is very porous. “Even a hard wood is still porous,” she said with a laugh. “Getting it controlled has been a challenge. Now that I've figured it out, it's become a little almost trademark-ish secret at this point.”

Never willing to sit still, Crow has plans to host “paint and sip” classes, only for woodworking. “Let's actually build something,” she said. “Let's get you out there with a skill saw. Start small. Get you out there with a drill press, you know? These items that maybe aren't as intimidating, and teach you how to build something. And then after that, if you like it, which most people do, not just women, you feel a sense of accomplishment, just looking at a small cheese tray and saying, ‘I made that. I cut that, I painted that, I did that.’ I love teaching. I absolutely love teaching.”

A lot of us lack the ability to connect with other people, Crow said. “And if you're working with somebody in a shop, you have to connect with them, because you could get hurt.”

She’s planning on a bigger, standalone workshop (Crow currently works out of her garage) with a larger team of artisans. “Bringing people into my shop is something I am so craving and looking forward to, because you have to talk. You'll have to communicate. You have to ask for help lifting a big sheet because you can't do it by yourself. You're going to have to work together.”

If you’re interested in Crow’s designs, be sure to visit her Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/crowcreekdesignsak/) or Instagram pages (https://www.instagram.com/crowcreekdesigns/).