The Empty Vessel

Many woodturners are drawn to making vessels. Many make simple bowls, some make more elaborate bowls, often with decoration added by methods other than turning. Some make hollow vessels with tiny necks, others make goblets or boxes. Inspiration has been drawn from many sources including ancient art, nature and contemporary art.

The Empty Vessel is a blog by Susan Lomuto Rose about "the container as art". There you will find many stunning contemporary vessels, some from names familiar to woodturners, others from artists from many other disciplines. A great source of inspiration for woodturners, and other artists, that I would highly recommend.

AAW Symposium 2007

Blogger Alan Irwin has been covering the 2007 American Association of Woodturner's Symposium in Portland, OR. So far he has covered day 1 and day 2.

The AAW have also published a lot from the symposium, the best in my opinion being the catalog from the invitational exhibition, Japanese Bowls: a western perspective, and Turning Green - An International Juried Exhibition of Woodturning.

Pysanky and Trypillian decoration

Yeah, I know. It's been a long time since my last post.

I recently got an e-mail from Philip Streeting of Woodturning Plus wondering why I hadn't posted anything here in a while. Apart from doing nothing but uninspiring work in the shop like bottle stoppers and coring bowl blanks, I have started a new blog A Somerset Family History and I'm giving SunriseTrail.ca a makeover. To make matters worse, I have just started building another garden shed. So until today I just haven't had anything worth posting here. Until this morning...

While searching YouTube for videos for my Craft Videos blog, I came across this video about decorating eggs:



I wasn't too excited about this until Eve started using an egg lathe. She used this and it's indexing head to mark out an egg ready for decorating with aniline dyes using a wax-resist technique called pysanky. This got me wondering if the same technique could be used on wood turnings? The most likely problem that I can foresee is that the hot wax (which is applied with a stylus called a kistka) will migrate along wood pores and leave a fuzzy edge. Has anyone very tried this on wood?

Most of the traditional Ukrainian designs don't do a lot for me, but on Eve's website she mentions a style called Trypillian.

The Trypillian people lived in the Ukraine 6,000 years ago. These eggs are characterized by the large motifs in earth tones.

I found some examples here that I liked, but the style was originally used on ceramics, and there are contemporary examples at trypillian.com. I can see how the spiral patterns may have been carried on in Celtic cultures.

So, some nice ideas there that might be applicable to woodturning. Right now though, I'm too busy to find out. Any takers?

Design resources

One of the reasons I read blogs about other crafts is that they often have ideas and links that I can apply to my woodturning. My friend Cyndi recently posted Online Jewelry Design Tools, which includes some resources that applies to the artistic design of anything.

Formal Visual Analysis: The Elements & Principles of Composition by Jeremy Glatstein is a very concise explanation. It is worth keeping as a check-list. When looking at work by other artists, we can examine how they use each of these elements and principles in their work. When designing for ourselves, we can make sure that the final design addresses each item on the list in a sensible manner.

In any work of art, all of these elements and principles will be present, but some will be more obvious than others.

For those who want more depth to their understanding of design, Art, Design, and Visual Thinking is an entry level course, an introduction to design concepts and the idea of visual language. If you plan on using color in your work, whether by painting or just using more than one species of wood, Cyndi also mentions an earlier post of hers, Online color training and tools.

Cyndi also recommends a couple of books in her post, but I would also like to add Design!: A Lively Guide to Design Basics for Artists & Craftspeople which was recommended to me a year or so ago by Bobbi Chukran, and I find it very useful. It covers pretty much the same ground as the online course mentioned above, but has lots of examples and analysis of designs in a wide range of media.

Repetition as a design element

One of the simplest methods of making our work more visually interesting is to repeat a motif. If we limit ourselves to pure woodturning, this might be as simple as using sets of small beads as I have done here, using a group of three inset beads and a group of two inset beads.


We might also get more adventurous by using other techniques such as pyrography, painting or carving to add a repeating motif to our work.

I was prompted to bring this subject up by a post by Karl Zipser on Art & Perception titled Is grownups’ art art?. Karl is comparing the design on some eigth century pottery to something made recently by a child, but in doing so shows how the child's work can gain a sense of rhythm and complexity by repetition of the whole design and elements within it. It really is worth taking a look to see how this has been done and the impact it has.

If you want to study this some more, there are plenty of examples of repetition in A Study of Different Modes of Repetition in Art and Design, and a nice little tutorial on the subject at Principles of Design - Repetition.

Do you use repetition in your designs?

Woodturning Plus

There is a new blog on the block. Woodturning Plus is written by UK turner Philip Streeting.

This seems to be a blog with a mission. Philip is critical of the British woodturning scene:

"...the focussing of attention in British woodturning on matters relating to technique and finish, was inhibiting the growth and development of the craft."

So this is what Woodturning Plus is going to be all about:

"This Blog is intended for those in the UK who ...... have found their current sources of information or encouragement either unsatisfactory or unchallenging. I will be adding entries that may help creative thinking and doing, using net and book references. ....... It will be for you ..... to find your own solutions using the same trial and error processes that most makers in other disciplines use to achieve their unique designs for any given project or method of working.

So if you are reading this and you are a woodturning craft fundamentalist having no wish to see tools used incorrectly, grain abused and alternative materials used with wood, then this is not the site for you."

I don't think this is an issue restricted to the UK, so I am sure that his blog will be of interest to wood turners from around the world. I don't think that the 'problems' Philip perceives are geographic. There are certainly some fine and creative woodturners in the UK. Wherever we live I think we need to be aware of the woodturning culture that we expose ourselves to, whether it is clubs, periodicals, galleries or shows. This culture is not just about design, but also things such as quality of workmanship, and skills and opportunities for marketing and promotion. Education is another factor. Someone with a degree in fine arts is going to have a huge advantage in terms of design matters over someone who comes to woodturning as a hobby and is just wanting to be able to make things. And there is nothing wrong with this, but I do agree that there is a big distinction between a craftsman and a designer-craftsman.

Long time readers of The ToolRest will know that I am thinking along similar lines to Philip, and have blogged about some of these issues in "Who influences your work?" and "Inspiration for woodturners". In those posts I have attributed some of the blame for these issues on the woodturning press. For example, when Woodturning Design first came out I had high expectations for some refreshingly different content, but unfortunately I now realise that they really meant to call it Woodturning Designs, or maybe Woodturning Projects. Too bad. Anway, I hope that Philip and I can keep some sort of dialogue going between our blogs and provide some content that is lacking in the mainstream press, or maybe even encourage them to change their focus. I am not going to be as radically selective in my content as Philip though, and you can be sure to continue to find tips and techniques here too.

Before I sign off, I should point out that Philip also has a website, woodturningdesign.info, which has some very nicely presented papers, such as 'An Introduction to a Design Method for Woodturners'.