Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
My mom taught art and she got cancer when I was four and had to have a lot of treatment.
And so she put me in a lot of art classes. By the time I was in kindergarten I could
pretty well draw what I could see. Which was kind of unusual.
So I did platters and bowls and vases and sculptural forms, tea pots. And then I inlay
designs in them that I carve that are often seen from nature of flora and fauna.
Wood turning is a technique that goes back, actually centuries where wood is spun on a
lathe, and hand held tools are used to shape it.
There's a lot of experimentation involved in doing what I do because it was a new technique.
Nobody had done mineral crystal inlays before.
And so I have equipment leftover from electronics business where I could heat things and cool
it and subject it to stress to make sure these new techniques would not fail later in a museum
collection, or personal collection.
Denali has had an influence so far, having only been here a few days, but I've been thinking
about shapes of animals horns, the ram and the moose and caribou. And the patterns for
example in a ram's horn, how there are layers, the growth rings that look like growth rings
in wood. I'm really interested in the braided patterns in the rivers because I've been doing
some flat work designs in recycled guitar woods that are carved in an inlayed with gravels,
beach sand, and paua shell. And it's kind of been the genesis of an idea for maybe a
piece I'll make for Denali.