The panels are made up of small wooden diamonds cut either on a 30 or a 60 degree angle. They are cut with four different saws so that their dimensions are identical. The wood is finished with simple varnish – no painting or staining changes the natural hue of the material.

Marquetry—an art form in which small pieces of wood are overlaid onto another wood surface to form a picture—goes back eight generations in Ed Lantzer’s family, but his
family tradition dictated wood pieces cut on a 45 or 90 degree angle. His father taught him the skill.

“My dad was a 45-90 man,” he says. “I was able to work with that until I was 15. At that point my dad said, ‘go find your own angle.’ I chose the 30-60.”

Click here to read a critique by Gregory Waskowsky, Outreach Curator at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts