Craft in America

I began with turning when I was fifteen. I was always carving wood and just the idea working in wood as a material was especially appealing. My father was always very artistically inclined. He was an architect, his profession but in the late 50s he decided to try the woodturning because he'd like to make sculptures out of wood. Is that holly? No that's ash.... When my father began turning, the pieces he was making were probably little bitty cups and plates, maybe four inches in diameter but I think he had this urge to see could he go bigger than that and instead of just flat pieces or just shallow pieces. He was able to make pieces that would actually curve over and he could hollow out. He invented his own tools and actually used a forge and an anvil to bend these tools and make the tools that he felt would help him in this turning process. When my grandfather was creating this process, these tools did not exist and so he was learning along the way. What you see is used today is an adaption of what he created in the beginning. He basically had to fabricate his own designs. I'm always marveled at how he came up with a lot of these things. You have to visualize you have a five or eight hundred pound log here rotating. He was known probably best for the large pieces because some of them were probably almost four feet in diameter and maybe three and a half feet tall. So this log, I, the original log mounted on the lathe probably weighed two thousand pounds. As I was a child we would go over to my grandfather's house, my brother and I, there is a piece was photograph of his, a large globe shape and in the piece you couldn't tell the scale of it so they put an apple next to the piece and it didn't do it justice for how big it was. People still didn't get the concept of these were really large architectural size shapes and so he put me inside the piece.