My Turn

My studio is almost together, but I had to stop working on it to focus on the house itself, so that we can move in by the end of the month. It’s a satisfying but exhausting experience. Everything I do is for the long term: no throwing on paint to make a room livable; instead, it’s careful (and, yes, tedious) preparation followed by meticulous execution. Still to go is more painting and then laying floors.

Here are some photos of the initial transformation of the garage into my studio.

As you can see, the aluminum siding covered simple wooden louvers. I dismantled them and used the wood to frame the windows and air-conditioner and the siding on the outside, as well as for a frame for my dust collector, as you will see in later photos. Recycle!

Under the tutelage of my friend Art, I learned to frame a wall, install windows, put in insulation, put up drywall, and much more. In this photo, one wall opening has been framed and drywalled; the other is in process.

Since this photo, I’ve installed an air-conditioning unit and added trim around everything. I still haven’t finished caulking and prepping, and I still need to prime and paint, but I will get to it, I swear.

And inside, I’ve added a lot of new equipment—bandsaw, belt sander, drill press, dust collector—but haven’t yet moved over my lathes and tools. Except for a demonstration, I have not turned since the end of April. I miss it, but I am finding satisfaction in these other pursuits. It is exhausting, though, so I make no promises as to resuming regular updates to my blog.

My partner and I close on the purchase of our first house in less than a week. This means I will have my own studio for the first time! I’ve been having fun shopping for new equipment and planning my new space, which will be in the garage. The electricity in the garage is insufficient, so I am having an electrician install a new panel and a bunch of outlets. A friend of mine and I will frame one wall and install windows and a room air conditioner.

Besides working on my studio, I will also be laying new flooring in the house and repairing walls and painting and doing maintenance on the roof, so it may be a month or two before I actually return to turning full-time. In the meantime, I can still work in my current studio—whenever I’m not working on the house or packing and moving our stuff.

I will try to keep you up on the progress of my studio. I have been avoiding blogging because this has been the most stressful month I can remember in years! Besides, I’ve barely had time to turn. But very soon I’ll have something to blog about again.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, last month I prepared (and gave) a talk for the docents of the Tucson Museum of Art, on woodturning as an artform. Besides giving a brief history of artistic turning, I described the basic anatomy of trees and discussed some of the characteristics of wood and the vessel form.

Thinking about the anatomy of a tree unsettled me this time around. Trees are living organisms; that wood was once alive, I feel, makes it unlike other media (except maybe basket materials). But the heartwood that woodworkers so value is dead wood. Heartwood is formed as a tree’s cells die; the life of a tree is all in those layers between the heartwood and the bark.

Heartwood, dead wood; a living organism dead at its center. The image has been stuck in my mind like a sand grain in my shoe.

Today, my perspective shifted. It occurred to me that heartwood is the tree’s past. It “lives” in the tree as our past—also dead, having literally passed—lives in us. Our history forms our structure, storing molecular bits of ourselves, recording cycles of abundance and privation, unseasonable frosts, long summers, lightning strikes, patterns of growth. Like trees, we become who we are as each old layer dies, as each new layer forms.

We live in the layers between our past and the (also dead) outer bark that protects us.

I’m wondering if the universe just wants me to shut up for a while. I’m so crazy busy that I barely have time to breathe!

I leave for a show in Casa Grande in a couple of hours, then I come back to prepare a talk for the docents of the Tucson Museum of Art and prepare for the spring show at the museum. And, oh yeah, my significant other and I are trying to buy our first house at the same time! One with my own workshop, of course.

After being glued to the computer for 10 days or so, I have finally finished updating my work-for-sale pages. “Finished” is, of course, a relative term. There are about a dozen pieces I need to rephotograph before I can post them, but for now, I’m declaring I’m caught up, so today I get to go back into the studio!

I have so many pieces I want to make. Forcing myself to sit at home and work on my web site has required discipline. These tasks are not the ones you imagine when you think about being an artist. But if you don’t do them, you have to find another way to pay for your artmaking—or at least for your food and shelter.

I will blog more later. Now I’m off to make stuff!

I had no idea it had been so long since I last posted. I was busy preparing for and then enduring the Tubac Festival of the Arts. It was five long days (two days longer than justified by the traffic it attracts, I think), and now that it’s over, I am focusing on updating my web site, specifically the work-for-sale pages, which have been down since before the ITE last summer.

I hadn’t photographed any of my work since the ITE, so I spent two solid days before the Tubac show photographing everything I had on hand. Regrettably, I neglected to photograph the new work that I have sold over the last six months. Now I have about 750 photos of remaining new work to tweak, crop, and load into web pages. (The large number is because I take multiple views of each piece, both for documentation purposes and so that online customers can really see each piece.) This includes my remaining ITE pieces, which heretofore had been photographed only by John Carlano—and only one view of each, at that.

Here are two views of a reconceived “In Her Dream.” This is the piece originally (in the Wood Turning Center’s “alTURNatives” exhibition) displayed suspended in a Japanese maple branch. There was no way to transport that very fragile branch back here after the exhibition, so I had to redream the context of the piece. I love what evolved. I started by displaying the vessel on the stones, then added the carved, dyed sassafras base just before Tubac.

I think of this second image as a boudoir shot of the piece. It makes me smile.

I’ve given myself until the 24th to finish updating my site, because I will be out of town next week.

Now that I’m almost caught up, I’m going to try to set aside a regular time to photograph work. Posting photos here will be an incentive. So will not having to face this mountain of work all at once.

The Collectors of Wood Art (CWA) held their annual forum in Scottsdale this weekend, and I was able to drive up for some of the Saturday sessions.

I first got to see a panel discussion chaired by sculptor Connie Mississippi, with sculptor-carver Susan Hagen, turner Merryll Saylan, turner Virginia Dotson, and furniture maker and artist Wendy Maruyama. The theme was place, and each artist presented images of places and work inspired or informed by those places.

Susan Hagen focused on a series of ten dioramas (Recollection Tableaux) she created for the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, depicting aspects of life in the prison throughout its history.

Merryll Saylan talked about home and community as place. Some of her pieces had domestic themes; some were more broadly influenced by her environment (e.g., changing color palettes), neighborhood (urban, industrial), and community (family, friends).

Virginia Dotson focused on the geology and cultures of the American Southwest, showing images primarily from Canyon de Chelly. As a desert dweller myself, I have always loved her geologic layered work, and I was interested to see that her new work incorporates painted petroglyph and petrograph motifs.

Wendy Maruyama touched on the World War II Japanese-American internment camps in the United States but focused mainly on inspirations from visits to Japan and China. Her incorporations of hentai images from Japanese pornographic comics and iconic images of Godzilla were particularly amusing. She has also begun using digital video in her work, such as a video of an Asian woman (her sister) applying “dragon lady” makeup, seen through a two-way mirror in a piece.

After a break, the forum continued with digital-image or slide presentations by various artists, emphasizing future work.

I first discovered the exquisite naturalistic carvings of Janel Jacobson this summer in the collection of Fleur Bresler. Janel showed the progression of her work from relief carving in clay to the fully dimensional wood carvings she now does, and she shared some of her specific techniques. The detail in her work is astonishing.

Turner Dewey Garrett’s work always interests me. He is always exploring fresh ideas, informed by his background as an engineer. He has now built himself an ornamental-turning system, but he’s not content to stick with traditional rose engine patterns; he has written software for himself that enables him to create patterns on the fly.

Sculptor Michael Peterson is continuing to explore organic shapes and textures in his work. I find his work irresistible.

Sculptor Jack Slentz is playing with Swiss cross and gear and star shapes, and complementary pieces combining positive and negative shapes. He is also using new materials: stitched rubber and street signs.

Kerry Vesper, furniture maker and sculptor, is carving wave or flying-banner forms and blossom forms in plywood. He is also playing with collaborations with glass artist Alisha Volotzky.

Todd Hoyer and Hayley Smith say they haven’t been making a lot of art recently, because for the last three years they have been engaged in building their studios and a house. Their joint presentation was about just that process. It was particularly interesting to see how the process reflects their approach as artists; for example, the floor of Hayley’s studio is essentially a sample board of colors and textures they were testing for use in floors in their house.

After the presentations, I spent a couple of hours savoring the del Mano Gallery exhibition set up in the conference center. They had multiple pieces from some four or five dozen artists. I haven’t taken so many photos since the ITE. I would share some with you, but I think del Mano would prefer that I not. You can see a lot of work at their web site, however, so check it out.

Going to the forum also gave me the chance to say hello to some friendly faces I met through the ITE this summer: Elisabeth Agro, Albert and Tina LeCoff, Steve Keeble and Karen Depew, Arthur Mason, Joe Seltzer. Brief though my visit to the forum was, it really makes me want to get back to the work I’ve been distracted from by moving and shows and holidays and new toys. I have so many pieces just begun or even just sketched out that draw and build on my ITE experience. That’s the work that excites me most, but, alas, it must yet wait for another few weeks, until after my next show. It must wait because it requires space, psychic space, birthing space. In the meantime, I think about it, dream about it, plan it, work out the details. It gestates in me.

I’m gradually getting settled with my new lathe in my still-newish studio digs, but here are some pictures, finally.

I plan to install pegboard on the divider behind my lathe for easy tool access.

I’m still finding places for many things. In the meantime they clutter my work bench. Notice the handy space for wood storage below my bench.

You can see the lathe (a 1.5-hp Delta) and work space of the studio’s owner and my shop mate, Pat Reddemann, in the background.

Right now, my old lathe abuts the new one. The plan is to set up my vacuum chuck on the old lathe for both Pat and I to use whenever, without having to change the setup on our primary lathes. We will probably find a new spot for my old lathe soon, so I’ll have more working room at the end of my new lathe.

Pat got this new 18″ Grizzly bandsaw just a couple of months ago and has already gone through several blades.

This storage area and my tool chest area to my right as I face my lathe. The cabinet is full of wood. The shelves hold mostly half-finished pieces and finishes and solvents.

Pat and I share larger logs we’ve harvested together: a lot of mesquite, but also some African sumac and pepper tree.

Under the tarp is yet more of the wood I’ve harvested from locally felled trees, mostly mesquite.

This has been an amazing year, full of blessings and dislocation and pain and healing and promise and opportunity and redemption. Most of all, it has been a year of realizing how much support I continually receive from all of you—family, friends, fellow turners and artists, mentors and teachers, customers and collectors, would-be customers, gallery owners, program administrators and staff, students, blog readers, well-wishers—all of you who with your words and actions communicate your support for me and my artwork.

Because of your generosity in all its forms, I celebrate a year of successes small and large, an abundance of love, a wealth of prospects.

I thank you and wish you a happy and prosperous new year. May you receive back tenfold all you have given me.

This post falls under the “and more” subject of this blog (“A weblog about woodturning, artmaking, and more”).

I like to think myself courageous in the face of any challenge, but I’ve recently had to learn a new kind of courage: the courage to be happy.

It’s a strange concept for someone who has spent her life fighting—to survive, to be, to want to live.

This strange new idea was reinforced recently by a touching scene in an episode of the TV series Pushing Daisies (“Smell of Success,” broadcast November 21, 2007). In the scene, Vivian Charles, one of a duo of retired synchronized-swimming sisters who have been grieving the apparent death of their niece, addresses her sister, Lily.

“It used to make you so happy, the water. I think it’s brave to try to be happy. You’ve gotten so comfortable being unhappy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up in the morning and choose to be happy? To let the water wash everything away?”

The episode ends with a sweet rendition by Vivian of Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken” as the sun breaks through rain and the sisters return to the water.