Today we’d like to introduce you to Chelsea Cousineau.
Hi Chelsea, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I’m Chelsea Cousineau and I make art out of wood. My love for the arts began as a child spending time with my grandma who was an art teacher. She taught me how to make stained glass pieces, work with watercolor and acrylics, and how to allow myself to play and be creative. I spent many summers with her making various forms of art. The incorporation of wood into my art didn’t come until later in life, after many years of working in my family’s hardware store. When I first began working with wood, I would make stencils out of heavy paper and spray paint designs on pieces of wood that I would find rummaging through the cutoff bins in our wood shop. A Pinterest search for DIY wood gifts during a very low-budget part of my twenties resulted in my first geometric piece, a gift for parents. I had no idea how to use any of the cutting tools in our wood shop but with some experienced help and lots of practice, I learned how to work with various styles of saw and sanders that allow me to create intricate, geometric designs. That turned into more and more gifts until I began getting requests for custom pieces to be made. At that point, I decided to try to turn it into a business and got my first booth at a summer street fair in Grosse Pointe. The support I received from that point on catapulted me down a path of turning my little side hustle into a real business that generated actual income for myself. To set myself apart from other wood artists, I try to be as creative and unique with my designs as possible, using different angles and shapes, as well as creating all of my own custom color stains by adding pigment to wood oil. Another unique aspect of my business is that aside from geometric designs, I also love recreating landscape photos with wood, using different grains, species, and textures to recreate imagery that occurs in nature, like waves and clouds. I’ve done beaches, mountains, sunsets, and more. More recently, I’ve been working more with home decor pieces. I’ve made coat hangers, shelves, and serving trays, which have been my most successful works. My name used to be Detroit Craftswoman, because I was living in Detroit at the time and basically making crafts on the floor of my apartment. I recently rebranded my business and renamed it Quai Designworks (pronounced “kay”), paying homage to my Celtic roots with the translation of my name, Chelsea to Quai. I have big plans for the future of my business and plan on incorporating my designs into home furnishings like side tables, dressers, doors, and headboards. Most of my work is created using pieces of wood that I repurpose from scraps and cutoffs from the wood shop at the hardware store. Kind people who know me will bring me wood they find or tell me if they see discarded wood in the nearby alleys or the end of driveways. I then mill it all down to the sizes and need and create designs that allow me to use what I have. I try my best to always repurpose and recycle to make my business as sustainable as possible. Most of my work is currently word of mouth but since the creation of my website (www.chelseacousineau.com) and my investment into my social media pages (@quaidesignworks), I am hoping to share my art with many more people and connect with other artists!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Time management has been the biggest struggle that I’ve experienced. Figuring out how to balance work life and home life while also devoting enough time to my art that is required to make money from it has been challenging and at times stressful but always worth it, even if that means working late days and weekends. It always seems like there’s just not enough time and I’d like to be able to spend even more time on my art than I already do. That being said, I’m grateful to have the time available at all to focus on my craft.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I use wood to create designs with different colors and textures that can be used as wall art or incorporated into home decor like shelves, table tops, serving trays, key/coat hangers, and more. I’m known for using oak, teak, mahogany, and walnut in my designs and my specialty is combining the natural color of the woods with bright handcrafted stains to create bold designs that pop against the natural grain, texture, and color of the wood. I am most proud of my ‘Michigan Wildflowers’ piece that was showcased in the Grosse Pointe News Finer Pointes Art Contest which featured wood-burned and lightly stained flowers surrounded by a geometric flower and leaf design. I think what really sets my work apart from others is my combination of geometric and organic shapes that comes from my ability to use my different tools and techniques to create unique shapes and designs. Sometimes I just sit down my pencil and graph paper and get weird, drawing whatever comes to mind and figuring out how to make new, interesting shapes with angles and color placement.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
I could never pick one favorite memory because my childhood is rich with them, so I will say that a series of memories are my favorite and those involve my travels with my family as a child. Instead of tons of toys and things, my parents believed in giving the gift of experience, so they took my brother and I to many different places throughout the United States over the years. Trips out west to different National Parks like Zion, Yellowstone, and Mesa Verde helped to develop my love for nature and the Earth and constantly inspires my work, to the point where I even created an entire collection paying homage to the National Parks, where I created geometric mountains with organic landscapes that represented 12 different parks throughout the US. My memories traveling with my family inspire me and encourage me to go back out into nature for more inspiration!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chelseacousineau.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/quaidesignworks
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/quaidesignworks
