About John T. Unger

I'm best known as an artist and designer, but relaxing makes me tense, so I tend to put in a lot of hours on diverse projects.

I've been making art professionally since about 1995, and have made a full-time living as an artist since 2000. On the way to a successful art career I've been a poet and writer, a tech geek, a print and web designer, illustrator, industrial designer, musician, teacher, actor, set designer and even a paid guru once.

I like to joke that I'm the world's most well-educated self-taught artist — I've learned pretty much everything I know by doing it. I work in a lot of different styles using a wide variety of materials. I find that each new medium informs all which have come before.

It's all the same thing in the end— I wake up most days thinking about how I want to change, fix or improve some aspect of the world. And after a couple cups of coffee I get started on it. My speciality is impossibility remediation: if it can't be done, I'm on it.

Art has been good to me, and I feel very lucky to have been able to pursue what interests me on my own terms. As an artist, I am also a small business owner who supports a family, pays taxes, and supports other local businesses through the sale of my firepits. It takes a small army of highly professional people to make this much art and keep the quality and service at the level you deserve. My staff supports me by bringing their skills to the studio and I support them with a fair wage.

I'm proud that in a time when more traditional businesses have been cutting employees, I've been able to create jobs and provide work for so many talented people. The current team includes my wife, Marcie, who handles shipping and much of the office work; Sales Rep, Lin McIntosh; Studio Assistant Bill Nesbitt; Virtual Assistant, Emma Gross; Rockstar CPA for bookkeeping and taxes; Stephen Zraleck at Bone, Mcallister, Norton and Jason Young at Traverse Legal for copyright and patent work. I've also been lucky to work with the team at Men With Pens who have done an amazing job helping me redesign the website to make it both prettier and more functional; Rebecca Glotfelty who shot the video for all the firebowls and Sheharzad Arshad who created the map animation for the firebowl videos.

About the Art:

My creative mandate is "sustainable design with an edge." Just because we're good doesn't mean we have to be boring, right? I think there's a place for rock n' roll to dance with environmental responsibility in a house shakin' way. If green products are to compete in the market, they need to be sexy, sleek and chic— cooler than new.

Surprise and beauty are a good start, but I expect more and so should you. As an artist and designer, I am intensely committed to sustainable design practices and materials in the following ways:

I work primarily with recycled or re-used materials. This is the best way I know to minimize my impact on natural resources, climate and the environment. In addition, I feel that creative re-use has the potential to spark new ways of looking at the world… if one thing can be turned into another, what else can we change? Successful recycled art and design encourages creativity in others— it's alchemical, magical, subversive, and transformative by nature. I feel that only be a good thing.

I design for permanence. Most of my objects will last generations with little or no maintenance. I try to create objects that will never go out of style by drawing from primal metaphor and classical elements of design that speak to what it means to be human and alive.

I design for functionality. My work is intended to be useful as well as beautiful. I enjoy the practical aspect of art and feel that engineering is as critical as ingenuity in the creation of solid works of art. Where possible, I design for easy disassembly for shipping or later re-use of materials.