More Top Picks Best Mini Fridges
player ready...Depending on your artistic leanings, a Winifred Ross lamp is either a sculpture or table jewelry. Her creations, actually mere household appliances, incorporate a light bulb and offer hours of visual pleasure.
With recent magazine write-ups in Southern Accents, House Beautiful and Vogue, the Baton Rouge artist’s handcrafted limited-edition lamps are receiving national attention and are available at Mario Villa Gallery in River North.
Her one-of-a-kind lamps in such classic or organic forms as obelisks, fiddles, palm trunks and medieval maces are devised of cast clay, wood and steel, and then finished with a variety of surface (smooth, textured or patterned) treatments.
The shades are as unique as the bases-some are turned wide-end-up and others are hand-painted in distressed gold or aluminum leaf or acid-washed silver leaf.
The lamps range from $500 to $950, depending on size.
Formerly a ceramicist with a master’s degree in fine arts, Ross says she was drawn to lampmaking about four years ago when a designer friend complained that she was having difficulty finding the kind of lighting she wanted for an interior and enlisted Ross’ help.
Her first piece was a chandelier she created out of what she calls “stream-of-consciousness-clay shapes encrusted on steel arms,” for the home of a prominent New Orleans plastic surgeon.
Mario Villa, the New Orleans-based artist/designer and a friend of the surgeon, saw the chandlier and was so turned on by it he asked Ross to create lamps for his furniture galleries in Chicago and New Orleans.
Response to her lamps has been so great that Ross says she has given up her fine arts career and now makes lamps, chandeliers and candlesticks full time.
Her connection with Villa, says Ross, “is perfect . . . since he’s an artist designing furniture and functional things for the home” and she’s definitely operating on the same current.
“As an artist, I could never do the same lamp over and over. The work has to change for me. Sometimes I regret I can’t keep doing the same designs that people want, but I have to move on to the next thing,” says Ross.
Mario Villa Gallery is at 500 N. Wells St.; 312-923-0993. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.