By Anne Kubena

In a small, dusty garage on the south side of Milwaukee, an artist is living her life-long passion as a creator. In her studio, 31-year-old artist Elizabeth Pintar unites art and function. She fuses traditional Midwestern arts-and-crafts techniques and her own unique design style. Pintar builds tables of all sizes with straight lines and precise geometric designs, much like Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs, but she manages to add something extra to this traditional design style – beauty and purpose.

The tops of the tables have a perfectly smooth, mosaic surface. The mosaics turn the tables into works of art. Her designs look almost mathematical, but are many times abstractions of things Pintar sees in her environment. “I think people need to be inspired by the things around them,” Pintar says.

She explains the mosaic top on a finished table, “You see those four aqua squares running up it? Those are those windows,” she says, pointing to four windows that spread across the garage door in her studio. “And I think the red was perhaps inspired by the hood of my car outside.” No one would ever guess this is how she got the idea, but her simple surroundings inspired one of her many unique designs.

“There’s no creativity in woodworking. It’s, ‘Here’s a pattern and I’m gonna build this,’ usually,” she says.

Pintar, on the other hand, stretches the limits of tradition and of her own mind much more than the average furniture builder. “Everything’s out of my head,” Pintar says.

She does this while maintaining a surprisingly high level of perfection, inherent in the arts-and-crafts design style. She maps everything out before she builds and works painstakingly on each piece of each table.

She also makes the tables usable in many ways. For example, one of her tables also serves as a wine rack. She attached wavy wrought iron to the open space between the legs of the table where bottles of wine can be placed. Judging by her skill level and attention to every detail, most would believe she’d been designing these tables for years.

In reality, it has only been about two years since Pintar started making furniture full time. After 10 years at a low-paying job as a frame shop manager, she decided to resign and take up the craft.

“I learned a lot of skills there and certainly an eye for what I’m doing now for straight lines and woodworking,” Pintar says of her former job. “Although, I was amazed how much I didn’t know when I actually started to build furniture.”

Truly, she had a lot of studying to do before she would start building her designs, but Pintar knew furniture was the craft she wanted to take up. She feels functional art allows more people to appreciate a work in more ways. So against all the odds, Pintar “just dove right in.”

Diving right into different kinds of art to express her creativity is nothing new for Pintar. She says she grows continually as an artist because she can learn things for herself and isn’t afraid to go against the grain.

After graduating from high school, Pintar received a full scholarship to Cardinal Stritch University to continue studying art. But her academic career there didn’t last long.

“It’s so backward and old-fashioned there … I’d much rather teach myself stuff,” Pintar says.

She also went to study art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but that didn’t work out either. “I generally end up resenting all of my teachers,” Pintar says. “When I need to know something, I go out and buy a book.”

That’s how she learned to make furniture and do mosaics. Pintar’s mother, Sandra Gruszynski, is fascinated by her daughter’s ability to be both creative and logical. “I like to watch the way she thinks,” Gruszynski says. "Her problem-solving abilities, how she decides to put one color with another or her artistic choices … it’s a gift.”

In the last two years, Pintar has acquired the skills she needs to build furniture on her own. “I built a plant stand and just kind of thought up a simple design to put together,” she says of her first table. “It turned out really nice and relatively square … there were no obvious flaws and I thought, ‘Well, hell. I can do this.’”

Pintar’s close friend and gallery owner Doug Powers says, “She has a need to create the object of art with the most detail she can.” Pintar has a more humble interpretation of her problem-solving skills. “I’m such a perfectionist,” she says. “That’s why I keep giving my stuff away. Nothing’s good enough for me!”

Pintar continues to improve and learn with each new piece combining art and function more seamlessly each time. “I want more function. That’s why [I am] working with a particularly smooth surface for the mosaic tops because who wants a table that’s not functional?

“No coasters either. I want to make sure that my finishes are durable enough that you don’t need a damn coaster if you want to set a drink down. That’s important to me.”

She says people can even keep her pieces outdoors without harming them at all.

So far she has given away a lot of her work but has only sold three tables, one of which Powers bought out of his own gallery and another that he commissioned. The other she sold at a gallery in Door County - her first real sale. “I had to photocopy the check, I was so excited,” Pintar says.

She hopes to start selling more of her work soon, but her furniture is not yet available in stores or galleries. Currently, the only way customers can get their hands on one of her pieces is by contacting her and placing an order or checking out what she has finished.

It may be a while until many of Pintar’s pieces are showcased. It takes her three or more weeks to complete a table when she works on it full time. Since she’s not making money yet, she has to do other work to make ends meet that takes her away from her studio. “I don’t get enough time here,” she says. “But, if money were important to me, I wouldn’t be doing this in the first place.”

Though the process is slow going, Powers is confident that Pintar will be a hit in the gallery scene. “People will really appreciate her works because they give back so much more than they ever dreamed possible,” Powers says. He says all she needs is to “stay original in her ideas and the world will open up.”