Writing Table and Desk 1935 - 1942

Henry Meyers created "Writing Table and Desk" and just look at the saturated red of this humble design! I like to imagine Meyers with his pencils and rulers, drafting the neat lines, but then something shifts, and he’s not just measuring, he's feeling. The red, slightly uneven, makes the table almost glow, as if it were a memory. What could Meyers have been thinking? Was this table special to him? Did he sit at it as a child? Did he build it himself? There's this tension between the precision of design and the warmth of feeling that really gets me going. It’s like he's saying, "Yes, this is a functional object, but it’s also so much more." I find myself thinking about those Shaker artists who brought their sense of the divine to making the simplest objects. There’s something similar at work here, a reverence for the everyday, which turns into something transcendent.