A self-proclaimed “furnituremaker,” Garry Knox Bennett mastered an impressively disparate portfolio of mediums during his six-decade career. Attending the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in the early 1960s, he trained initially as a painter, later pursuing design. Acclaimed for his inventive formal language, Bennett rejected the postmodern return to basic forms, more interested in the hyperbolized shapes of finely crafted materials. A testament to his craftsmanship, Bennett designed without prior sketches or planning, privileging a direct experience with his materials, which included wood, metal, glass and marble, amongst others. This California sensibility, bringing fine craft to experimental syntheses of materials and forms, is appreciable in the present lot, the Black Freighter console table, executed in 1990 during the zenith of Bennett’s career. Known for his affability, Bennett inscribed the underside of the table with a note thanking Jack and Helen Bershad for their patronage. Heralded in the craft and design communities, his work is held in the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among others.