Heck Yes Craft

There's something so timeless in the quiet, calming forms of Brooks Barrow's basalt and limestone tea light holders. And that's no accident. The Wisconsin-based sculptor and stonemason collects natural glacial stone from a deposit in his home state dating back to the last Ice Age.

Michael Scarborough took the long road to becoming a craft artist. After college, he spent 25 years as a professional opera singer, where he was exposed to a lot of different ideas about art and craft. But, he says growing up in Japan in the 1950s had the greatest influence on his craft, which, as you can see, has a distinctly Asian feel. Much of his work is done in wood and on the lathe, and he experiments quite a bit with traditional Japanese forms and finishes.

Peer into these shadowy landscapes. Or better yet - find a way to do it in person. Each piece in Jeff Zimmer's atmospheric new series Whitewash is made out of 7 to 19 layers of enameled, sandblasted flat glass - which the artist layers to create a three-dimensional image, gently lit from the back. "What the photos don't convey is the depth of the pieces," Zimmer says. The elements near the horizon are further away from the viewer than those in the foreground. "They shift in relation to each other as you move around the piece."

Behold the humble crayon - and the intricate forms it takes in the hands of Pete Goldlust, an Arizona artist whose materials include not only crayons but also polymer and recycled clothing. A carved crayon takes Goldlust about 20 hours to complete. He uses simple tools like X-Acto knives and drill bits, along with a citrus-based solvent. His designs come from many sources – tramp art, woodturning, peeling fruit, among them. Goldlust says he thinks of each crayon "as a sort of tribute to a particular form."

I'm a sucker for two things in this life: certain cheerful colors and pesky details. So when I saw Meredith Host's Dot Dot Dash porcelain tableware - with designs that are somehow both freewheeling and perfectly precise - I couldn't stop looking. Feast your eyes, as they say, on variations like her Dot Dot Pinwheel espresso cup set and a Dot Dot Biscuit place setting – then stay tuned for a story about Host and her awesome work in our December-January issue.