Alphonse Mattia sounds like one eccentric dude. The kinda guy you want to kick back and have a drink with and maybe get a little red eyed. I’m pretty sure he’s not completely off his rocker due to the fact that he teaches at Rhode Island School of Design. I’d say he’s more like that token eccentric professor just about every college seems to have. Or, he could be a complete blowhard that’s coming across comical. I’ve never met him, and I don’t know anything about him… so who knows. I do know that he likes to talk about himself in the 3^rd person, though, and says things like he’s one of the country’s leading educators and studio furniture makers. For all I know he could be the best damn teacher RISD has ever seen. And if you have pieces that are part of permanent collections at places like The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, The Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Yale University Art Gallery and The Phillip Morris Corporation you definitely have earned respect amongst peers.  Well, if you scratch The Phillip Morris Corporation off that list (they have a permanent art collection?) it would be a true statement. How could someone that flips these Mad Hatter type designs not be eccentrically rad?

Here’s another piece of his that caught my eye.