Ten Thousand Hours
Mark Moore Design was started, with the encouragement of family and fellow artist and friend Jes MaHarry, in 1997. With Jes’s advice, "just start doing it", Mark started working out of his father’s basement shop. After working odd jobs durning the day, he would spend time at night honing his skills, making small wooden objects and selling them by word of mouth. At the same time, he attended classes in American crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology, along with other adult education classes, learning wood and metal working techniques, furniture design, and drafting.
As Mark’s skills grew, he landed jobs as a paid shop apprentice under a few local artists and craftsmen. He quickly moved up the shop ranks from pushing a broom and assisting fellow craftsmen to head craftsman and running a shop of 5 craftsman, under local artist Scott Grove. During this time, Mark spent his earnings buying tools and equipment and he sought design inspiration through travel. Throughout the US, Europe and Asia, Mark visited museums, cities, and national parks studying art, architecture, and nature first-hand. A passion for sculpture and furniture grew from these experiences.
He began to develop his own techniques, which included carving unlikely materials like metal and glass, and intense stack laminations of wood to create unique textures, patterns, and shapes. Obsessed with contrast, Mark combines materials consisting of wood, metal, glass, and concrete, each one specifically chosen to create both physical and visual contrast to stimulate all of the human senses: warm, cold, smooth, rough, light, and dark. A love of planet and environment has driven the use of reclaimed, recycled, and locally sourced materials to create unique sustainable designs.
All of this has led to Mark creating his own genre of furnishings by melding elements of nature, architecture, and industrial design. After over a decade of learning to design, create, and run a business, Mark resigned as an employee and went to work full time for himself. Presently located in the foot hills of the Finger Lakes region of New York, he has his own shop, equipped to create anything imaginable. Here Mark continues to create his unique line of hybrid contemporary furnishings and sculpture for commercial and residential clients around the globe.
