Jack White launched a new website Wednesday, Jack White Art & Design, to showcase his work outside the realm of music creation, with sections devoted to practices that range from graphic design to sculptures to interior design to… yes, fans guessed it… furniture and upholstery, one of his first and most legendary loves.
Peeks into his process and projects include the first authorized, published photos from inside his Third Man Recording Studio in Nashville since it opened in 2008, part of the “Industrial Design” section, which also includes everything from a baseball field he had built in his hometown of Detroit to the Third Man pressing plant in the same cit.
The “Interior Design” section includes the Third Man record shops in Detroit and Nashville, plus a professional bowling alley he designed.
“Graphic Design” includes show posters dating back to White Stripes shows in 1997, and cover art for his own projects as well as elaborate Third Man releases like the mammoth Paramount Records boxed sets.
“Instruments and Hardware” encompasses from custom drum kits to the one-stringed instrument he built for the opening scene of the documentary “It Might Get Loud.”
“Vinyl Concepts” will be a favorite of anyone who has looked to the Third Man stores or label for unique and sometimes bizarre collectibles and novelties, like his infamous liquid-filled LP releases and “triple decker” records within a record within a record.
Other subsections are devoted to films he has directed and photography. But the most hardcore fan-satisfying part of the site may be “Furniture & Upholstery” — a profession that once paid the bills in pre-White Stripes stardom days, and which he has returned to in a more private mode that is mostly only being unveiled now, including a personally refurbished couch he worked on for the Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis.
“To work with Jack White, to watch him work at anything… is to witness the mind of an artist as it explores and problem solves,” Third Man’s Ben Blackwell said in a statement. “In carpentry and interior design, being in Jack’s presence during the ideation process, the hypotheticals and head tilting, can be both inspiring and maddening. There’s no reason a building needs to have acoustical tiles, tin ceilings or shiny yellow floors. But that’s not the point. The point is to make something beautiful. Any myrmidon can buy a building and start running a business selling chicken feet, but to take an empty space, to envision what you’d like it to look like, not just visually, but spatially, texturally, experientially, and design into that vision, making and taking the occasional left turns, keeping architects and contractors on their toes and folks like myself, who have to find the kind way to say ‘No Jack, I don’t think a fog machine would be a good idea for the pressing plant.’”
