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| Stephen Antonson at work tin his Brooklyn studio |
Adrift in a Sea of White... Plaster artist Stephen Antonson’s Brooklyn studio is like stepping into Dr. Zhivago’s frozen dacha, where everything, including furniture and chandeliers, is shrouded in snow and frost. This beautiful, otherworldly scene from the classic movie is how Wells Abbott owner Lauren Hudson remembers her first visit to Antonson’s atelier, when she arranged to bring his one-of-a-kind plaster pieces to Texas for the first time, via her showrooms in Dallas and Houston. “It’s like magic inside,” Hudson says of Antonson’s workshop, with its surfaces dusted in powdery white gypsum, and white plaster chandeliers dangling like icicles from the ceiling. Hudson bought almost everything in the studio that wasn’t already sold, including a massive plaster desk that took him 10 weeks to produce. The artist also created large plaster chandeliers for the entry of both Wells Abbott showrooms, along with table and floor lamps, and decorative accessories.
Antonson is a classically trained artist who studied at Carnegie Mellon University and got an MFA in photography at Hunter College. After years of showing his paintings and sculptures in galleries, he visited a New York plaster artist studio in 2002, and it changed his world. “There’s something ghostly about plaster’s whiteness that I like,” says Antonson, who also gets a charge out of working in a fast-drying medium. “Plaster starts out as a liquid, like paint, but you only have five minutes to work with it before it becomes solid, like sculpture. All your decisions have to be made in that time frame.”
For a while, Antonson was a freelance set builder who made his own furniture and lamps out of plaster. Visitors to his studio began asking him to make things for them, “and it just morphed from there,” he says. His company, Stephen Antonson by Hand, now produces collections of plaster tables, lighting, mirrors, and decorative objects such as vases and candlesticks, which are carried at a limited number of showrooms including Dessin Fournir in L.A., New York, and Chicago. Wells Abbott carries the line exclusively in Texas.
"When people are paying $10,000 - $20,000 for a chandelier, it’s a whole different category; it needs to look like the artist just put his tools down and walked away from it." — Stephen Antonson
Magazine editors go crazy for his white plaster pieces — he’s done lighting for former AD editor Margaret Russell, and a table for World of Interiors American editor Carol Prisant. He also regularly collaborates on projects with high profile designers such as Amanda Nisbet, for whom he made a giant sea coral chandelier with 160 LEDs, and he recently finished a 44-inch chandelier for Miles Redd. “Miles keeps me really busy,” he says. “He likes to amp up the color in his projects, and he often throws in a big white plaster piece in the middle of all that. The effect is amazing.”
Antonson vividly remembers his first commission from Michael S. Smith 10 years ago. “I got a call in the middle of the night from Michael, and he said, ‘Hey, I just saw this Queen Anne tea table at Christie’s that’s perfect. Do you think we could make a pair in plaster?’” Antonson quickly sketched the tables from photos from the auction catalog, found a seasoned carver in Maine to make the wood bases, then painstakingly painted the tables in plaster with a brush, sculpting and sanding in between layers. The finished tables were shipped to Barack and Michelle Obama’s private residence at the White House. The commission encouraged Antonson to think about how to use the ancient medium of plaster — a simple material made from gypsum and water — in non-traditional ways. “What I loved about the tables is their very historic American profile; instead of being in brown wood, we modernized them in all white,” he says.
“Glaciers are nature’s sculpture,” says Antonson, who collects antique photographs of glaciers, and is inspired by iceberg paintings he sees in museums, including Frederick Church’s masterpiece in the Dallas Museum of Art.
The chalky white substance was also the medium of choice for some of the early 20th-century’s most noted designers, including Serge Roche, Jean-Michel Frank and Alberto and Diego Giacometti. In the 1960s, John Dickinson used plaster to sculpt his hooved and footed furniture designs. Antonson looks to these original masters of plaster for inspiration, but lately his influences have come from the natural realm. His Shakleton collection of tables and lighting resemble icy ledges or cracked ice, and are named in honor of early Antartica explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. “Glaciers are nature’s sculpture,” says Antonson, who collects antique photographs of glaciers, and is inspired by iceberg paintings he sees in museums, including Frederick Church’s masterpiece in the Dallas Museum of Art.
Antonson employs trained artists and architects to assist him, and there’s always experimentation going on. “We have a big table set up in the studio called ‘What if’ — it’s where our research and development goes on, where we just try stuff,” he says. Nest Studio has recently tasked him with designing a line of hardware out of plaster, and Antonson has been experimenting with designs for plaster necklaces, and thin vessels similar to Venini’s handkerchief vases. Unlike early examples of plaster furniture and lighting, which cracked easily, Antonson reinforces his pieces with an underlying armature of wood or iron, which gives the plaster strength. All of Antonson’s plaster works bear the artist’s hand, with chisel, rasp, and sandpaper marks. “More and more people are having cheap plaster pieces made in China that have no character,” he says. “But there’s a whole sculptural aspect to what I do that’s imperfect and a little crusty. When people are paying $10,000 - $20,000 for a chandelier, it’s a whole different category — it needs to look like the artist just put his tools down and walked away from it.”
