Half in cream, half in deep marine blue, Blue Crescent copies the look of an old astronomical chart: one side scattered with the pitted detail of craters and seas, the other given over to a gradient of blue as smooth as dusk. Cut by hand from a single sheet and collaged beneath a dome of hand-blown glass, the two halves meet along a soft, uneven line, much as they would on the moon itself.
It holds its own on a bookshelf as easily as a desk, weighing down papers or simply catching the eye among other objects. Placed near a lamp at night, the blue side deepens further still, closer to the colour of the sky it is meant to recall.
Dimensions: 8.9 × 12.7 cm. Made in New York City.
Collaged paper beneath hand-blown glass, set on a felt base.
ABOUT the MAKER
John Derian
Since 1989, John Derian has worked from a single New York studio, turning the technique of decoupage into a signature practice of its own. Each object begins with a print pulled from his archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings and illustrations: botanical studies, maritime scenes, playing cards, birds, and fragments of natural history. Trained artisans cut the images by hand, layer them beneath hand-blown glass, and seal them so the paper becomes part of the object itself, not simply applied to its surface. The result sits somewhere between a functional object and a small work of art: a paperweight, a desk cup, a cake pedestal, a tray. We carry the collection at Tessuti because each piece holds its history openly. The prints are old, the glass is blown by hand, and no two pieces are ever quite identical, so what arrives on a shelf or a desk carries a little of the studio it came from. These are pieces meant to be used and lived with rather than kept for display alone, gathering the marks of everyday life the way any well-loved object does over time.
