Dunbrack’s “Functional Art” Finds a Home at Zoo Gallery Stores

By Bruce Collier November 2, 2006 Issue

That magnificent art you see at Zoo Gallery extends well beyond the store’s three locations in Destin Commons, Sandestin, and Grayton Beach. Owner Chris Wilson’s office on Airport Road — connected to the Zoo Gallery’s custom frame shop — is running over with unique pieces, notably the handmade furniture of New England artist Richard Dunbrack.

The desk in Wilson’s office is only the second the artist has built. “I needed to have a really neat desk for my office,” says Wilson. When he invited Dunbrack and his daughters to visit earlier this year, the artist told Wilson he had designed one for singer Carly Simon. The smaller pieces that make up the big piece all have their own history. “What he started doing is writing down where the different objects are from.” Wilson’s desk contains salvaged parts from five different states.

“He’s really neat, his way of seeing things,” Wilson says. Each of Wilson’s Zoo Gallery shops carries at least five Dunbrack pieces, mostly cupboards and clocks. Wilson’s convocation of Dunbrack furniture includes a cabinet with a “Naughty Nelly” doorstop, among other artifacts. A cabinet displayed in the frame shop was assembled in part from an old moonshine still. The results are works of art that are lively, colorful, artful, and—in the artist’s words — functional.

“He’s my favorite artist. I feel like on the Antiques Road Show about 30 years from now, they’ll be worth a ton of money.”

Besides the Dunbrack pieces, Wilson’s office is decorated with intriguing collectibles like a framed drawing by author Jim Harrison and a limited edition Tarzan poster signed by Johnny Weismuller. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of work by his wife Roxie, an accomplished artist who was born and raised in Fort Walton Beach and once taught art at Choctawhatchee High School. Her art was featured on the January 7, 2003 cover of The Beachcomber.

The Zoo Gallery was born 27 years ago in downtown Fort Walton Beach—“stuck down that alley way behind Fountain Square,” Wilson says. In 1985, the Auburn University graduate opened a second location in Destin’s Shoreline Village. In 1996, the Fort Walton Beach store closed. Three years later, Wilson launched his successful Grayton Beach location. In 2004, Destin Commons welcomed Zoo Gallery into its seemingly endless family of distinguished boutiques.

“There was nothing made by hand that was good quality,” Wilson says of the area’s art offerings all those years ago. The Zoo Gallery deals mostly in pieces exclusive to this area, what Wilson calls “the kind of stuff we love to carry.”

“Some call what I do ‘studio furniture,’ but that’s a really broad term,” Richard Dunbrack says from his Concord, Mass. studio. “Others call it folk art’ or ‘sculpture with utility.’” Dunbrack prefers to label what he does “functional art.”

“I’ve been doing these types of pieces 15 years.” Dunbrack used to fly planes and found he was getting a little bored waiting for clients to finish their business. “I’ve always been fascinated with old buildings that have been cast aside. I would go off and sometimes explore old buildings and farms. Stuff I found intriguing would follow me home — these sorts of ‘objects of passion’ people would hang on the wall. Except I kind of got carried away with it!”

Dunbrack sells a lot of “narrow, tall clocks” in the Northeast, while the newer, more spacious southern homes are more apt to take on his larger pieces. “Desks take up a ton of space and probably won’t move as fast as funky clocks and sideboards, so I tend to not do a lot of those. But when I do one, it’s a lot of fun. For someone like Chris, I can build it with him in mind.”

When the defense industry that employed Dunbrack started to tank, he took all those objects of passion and “started creating stuff with the element of humor in mind. I looked at these objects not from what they did but what they could do. I would cut all the tines off a pitchfork, put it on top of a clock and make it look like hair. It became a thing where I started cutting up and using fragments of things without any specific idea in mind of accomplishing anything. It’s more interesting to see where it’s going to go in the end.”

Dunbrack says that despite the praise heaped upon his art, there are plenty of misconceptions about his methods. “A lot of people think I take old existing pieces of furniture and mess with them, but I don’t. Once you get beyond the bones and the faÁade of the front you can be creative. For every piece I build there’s 10 or 12 objects I hold up to see if I can manipulate into the piece. It’s the biggest reason I don’t do commissioned work — it becomes very tedious. It’s easier to build stuff and just be really creative. Also, people form a picture in their mind and if it doesn’t live up to that, they’re really disappointed.

“I’ll build eight or 10 ‘skeletons’ if you will, and that’s all I do as far as a grouping. They will then take on a life of their own. Sometimes they just fall together. What I am capable of doing, I can mess with any kind of metals—cast iron, forged iron, things that are welded. The woodworking part, I grew up watching my father build, and I built plenty of tree forts as a kid. And I still have all my fingers and thumbs, so I must be doing something right!”

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