The Tennessee Deer Gate
A named commission. The design can be built again — under its name.
A picketed band runs the top third of both leaves under one long shallow arch; below it the plate is solid and cut clean through with a woodland scene — a whitetail buck, deer grazing, pines and hardwoods, ducks lifting, ground birds, palmetto fans and grasses along a continuous ground line. A round medallion carrying a paw print inside a lettered ring straddles the centre joint, and the gate is dark throughout.
Grasses, palmetto fans and a ground line run unbroken from stile to stile, and that continuity is structural: the picture is what the cutting left standing, so no antler tine, wing or blade can be an island. Tree canopies reach up to the rail above them for the same reason, and the medallion is fixed to one leaf with a matching half-round taken out of its neighbour, so the disc only reads as a full circle once the gate is shut.
Backing is what makes or breaks a cut panel — with field and sky behind it the silhouette stays crisp, and hard up against a close hedge or a wall it would go flat. What a buyer gets here is the game that is actually on their own ground rather than a stock pattern, and the picketed band along the top gives the eye somewhere lighter to go so the full width never turns into a billboard.
3 photos
Every angle
