Published on Sunday, August 14, 1994
© 1994 The Baltimore Sun

Claiborne, Md. -There's a fat white bunny sniffing out the carrots painted up the side rails of a bright blue step stool. There's a yellow, red and blue double "partners" desk for the grade school set, with a monkey and a lion peering through the "bars" of the side pieces, a circle-back chair with a crab instead of a shield in its center, pastel dining chairs decorated with fruit, a "Hoosier" cabinet with mirrored bird insets, and end tables with the feet and faces of sphinxes. And then there's a bye-bye blackbird chest of drawers that looks like Mayberry U.S.A. by way of Sunset Strip.

It's all furniture brought back from the oblivion of junk to cheerful, practical, exotic, original works of art. This is more than brightly refurbished cast-offs: This is whimsy with an attitude.

Claiborne Ferry Furniture is only a few months old, but the three Eastern Shore neighbors and artists who are its principals have already developed a distinctive, exuberant style that is being noticed in Maryland galleries from Baltimore to Berlin.

"We put our hearts into it. We want it to be us," says Robert Murphy, 43, one of the partners, an artist and carpenter whose earlier collaboration with the late artist Eric Dennard planted the seeds of the furniture venture in the minds of the three artists.

Dennard, a painter and sculptor who worked in Annapolis and the Eastern Shore, died last November of liver cancer at age 51. He had continued to produce his abstract sculptures during the year of his illness by drawing images that a graphic artist turned into blueprints and Mr. Murphy constructed in wood and returned for Dennard to paint. "It was great for me," Mr. Murphy says, "because it was the first time I'd been able to combine art and carpentry."

Artist Rennie Johnson, 46, another of the Claiborne Ferry three, takes up the story. "Robert saw an article in a magazine about a man making furniture . . . "

"Some guy from Texas," Mr. Murphy says.

"It seemed like a good idea," Mr. Johnson says, "that we could find junk furniture and then redesign it and paint it. Robert had the expertise to refurbish it, to make sure something had four legs and a back."

Mr. Murphy welcomed a chance to continue blending art and carpentry. Mr. Johnson and Claiborne Ferry Furniture's third partner, painter Jim Richardson, 47, had started a sign business to supplement their artistic work, but found that demand for signs dropped off considerably in the winter. They were looking for something else to occupy the colder months. So Claiborne Ferry Furniture was born in February. Mr. Murphy does the carpentry, and all three work on designing and painting the pieces.

Mr. Richardson says, "We borrow from each other. We've all painted for years and years -it's something that's quite natural for us."

Finding raw material has also proved to be no problem. Some items come from people who are tossing out an old bit of furniture.

"Yard sales, and there's an auction in Crumpton, and we just go over there and fill the truck up with basically things that people don't want," Mr. Murphy says. Items are sold in lots, he explains, and some buyers will buy a lot to get one item they want. Then they discard the rest of the lot.

"It's free," Mr. Johnson says.

"We try to keep our overhead at zero," Mr. Murphy says. "If we had to build things from scratch, we couldn't sell them, because it would be too expensive.."

"The idea is to redesign them, not to make them back to what they were, but to make them look different, not only in size and shape, but in color," says Mr. Johnson.

"To make them fun," Mr. Richardson says.

How do they decide what each piece needs?

"It sits around for a while," Mr. Richardson says. "Till I get an idea -and oftentimes it's not my idea, it's someone else's idea. It's a matter of looking at it long enough and talking about it and something starts."

Talking over ideas is easy for the three -Mr. Murphy's wife, Susan, also does some of the painting of objects, and Mr. Richardson's wife, Martha Hamlyn, helps with public relations -because they all live in the tiny community of Claiborne.

"We're all working in this little town, and we all know what we're doing, so the exchange of ideas is constant," Mr. Richardson says. He and Mr. Johnson first met in Annapolis, where both were painting, and where Mr. Richardson had a small gallery called Watermark. (That is where they met Mr. Dennard.) Mr. Johnson moved first to Tilghman, then to Claiborne, and Mr. Richardson and Ms. Hamlyn, who had visited and loved the community, soon followed. They met Mr. Murphy when, also attracted by the small-town charm, he moved there with his family some three years later. The artists are friends; all the families are close, and their children play together. Mr. Richardson and Ms. Hamlyn are private contractors to the U.S. Postal Service, collecting mail, selling stamps and performing // other post-office chores for the hamlet. They live in the big old building in the center of town that houses the postal operations and was a former general store; now the downstairs provides studio space for Mr. Richardson, with family living quarters upstairs.

Claiborne still offers a central location for the artists, who have exhibited their furniture in the Tomlinson Craft Collection in Baltimore, at the Gallery Upstairs at the Globe theater in Berlin, and at the annual Frederick Craft Fair in June. Next winter they'll be exhibiting in a show at the Academy of the Arts in Easton.

"It's not just painted furniture," says Carol Randrup, manager of Tomlinson Craft Collection at the Rotunda. "They rework the wood." She cites a hutch in which the artists incorporated parts of an old chair back to give texture and interest to the door fronts. "It's the addition of nice woodworking, and really nice painting on top of that."

"Making the stuff is, for us, anyway, comparatively easy compared with selling it," Mr. Richardson says. "We do sell out of our studios. If people want to come to Claiborne they can certainly see what we do and buy right from the studio."

They hope to attract the attention of designers who will order or buy things for clients.

"The other thing is," Mr. Richardson says, "we're not very interested in making production pieces. We've had some people come to us and say, 'Would you be interested in putting your [crab-back] chair in a catalog?' If we do that, we have to make 25 or 30 crab chairs. The whole reason for doing this is to be fun. We decided if it wasn't going to be fun, we weren't going to do it."

"We want to do art," Mr. Murphy says. "Each piece is signed, numbered and dated, so they're all originals."

For now, they're concentrating on finding the right marketing strategy and getting pieces out where they will be seen. Currently prices for these practical artworks start at about $150 and go up to $2,200, though most items cost only a few hundred dollars.

"Anybody who's interested in this furniture, this is the time to buy," Mr. Richardson says, laughing, "because if we do become successful -which is pretty clear in my mind that we will -they're going to be more expensive."

The Claiborne post office, central gathering spot for Claiborne Ferry Furniture, is just under four miles west of St. Michaels on Route 451. For more information, call 410-745-5219.