Last Thursday I was finally able to go to a meeting of the Woodturner’s Guild of North Carolina.  Yes, I join groups that meet on nights that I teach… Anyway, the guest presenter was David Ellsworrth, one of the true rock stars in the woodturning world.  He has been doing this since the early ’70s and he is, in many ways, the standard by which other turners are measured. Think of him as the Eric Clapton of turned wood.

He is also a wonderful, and extremely patient teacher.  Einstein is credited with saying “If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough.” David Ellsworth understands it very well indeed.  His pedagogy is so gentle that you almost forget that you are in a class. The other teacher that I know with this vibe is Chuck Dzuiban at UCF, so Ellsworth is in some very exceptional company.

On Saturday, I was very fortunate to participate in one of his three day long classes.  There were only 10 students each day and it was amazing.

I have been doing a work that uses a bowl gouge only about half the time and the rest of the time I use scrapers and skews.  Ellsworth uses the gouge for EVERYTHING.  This is how I worked early last year, and it was somewhat odd, yet reassuring, to get back into this technique. He also demonstrated a cut that is much easier done left-handed, and since I am almost completely ambidextrous, I tried it and it worked. My little ADD brain then said… “I wonder what else works better this way?”  So of course I learned all five gouge cuts from the left side.  This really helps to get into some weird spaces and it also allows you to follow the grain of the wood without playing Twister at 1000 rpm.

He is best known for his hollow forms and I have never even tried one, so of course, since I had the master there to teach me, I worked on learning hollow forms. When you do these, you work through a small hole at the top of the piece and remove all of the wood on the inside to exactly match the shape of the outside. This would be easy, except that you cannot see inside the piece. You do everything by feel.  It is like painting a portrait inside a shoe box in a dark closet by sticking your brush through a hole in the end of the box.  No problem!  I did not finish my piece on Saturday, but I hope to work on it some this weekend.  One never knows how many of these I will do, but you always accept the challenge of learning and mastering something new!

I also got to meet Frank Penta, who hosted the classes in his shop, and some of the Chapel Hill Woodturners http://www.frankpenta.com/sites/penta/ and these  guys are fantastic people!

So- I have a few new Salt and Light pieces that should be in the gallery soon, and I hope that sometime in June, I will finish hollow form #1.

Keep checking back -

Thanks

Tom

Havenhill Studios combines the work of two artists; Sally, a painter, and Tom, a woodworker. We are both strongly influenced by heritage and landscape. Much of Sally’s work focuses on Irish landscapes and sunny beaches in Florida and the Caribbean. Tom’s work is influenced by the pottery of the Cherokee and Choctaw and by the skills learned from his father and grandfather, both of whom were painters, photographers and woodworkers. He makes wood pieces that are both beautiful and useful.

We are still trying to figure out the nuances of WordPress galleries, so only a few pictures so far!