With visits to the workshop banned for a couple of days last week (for some peculiar reason), my efforts were diverted into thinking about turning, rather than doing it. I've decided to start work on a series of pieces entitled IsoDendron....which is simply a posh (arty?) way of saying 'Wood in Balance'. I've given much thought over recent months to making vases, bowls and urns that cannot support themselves because they won't have 'flat' bottoms, so each is going to have an exo-skeletal form to support it....hence the project's name.
A few years ago I dabbled with this idea when I was doing a bit of dinghy sailing and balance was of particular relevance. I was re-painting my dinghy and looking for some Celtic symbols to represent balance in nature, and found the ideal thing. An ancient concept, well known to our ancestral sailors, was the necessity to balance the forces of the water and of the wind. So, to appease themselves in the faces of the gods, it seems that ancient Celts painted symbols of creatures that represented these forces onto their crafts, with the sea-serpent representing the water and the greyhound representing the wind. This is quite relevant to me, as my workshop is right alongside the largest natural stretch of inland water in Wales, and frequented by many a sailor.
So here we have the 'signature' piece that heralds the start of work on the series.
This whopping platter is 20" (50cm) diameter and turned from a piece of Hungarian Poplar - which I believe is frequently marketed as Hungarian Tulipwood. It has a lot of pippy burr and a bit of spalting, and was an absolute pain in the neck to turn, due to hard little knots lying right next to soft areas of spalt. None-the-less, it stands as my first foray into the dark art of pyrography. It's had countless coats of Danish Oil, which it soaked up like a sponge, so I resorted to saturating it and putting it in the sun for the day, yesterday, then bringing it into the house to keep it warm and to help to get a surface coat of dry oil. That idea worked and today I was able to buff the front of it.
The reverse has a pyrographed title for the series, plus my name and my 'Otter Woodcraft' monogram. I've also turned a rim on the back so that I could inset a silver wire hanging loop. Sorry that the image quality isn't wonderful, but the platter is too big for my mini-portable-studio, so it had to be photographed on the lounge wall with Sal holding up a floodlight and a diffusor.
Now all that I need to do is to make the several pieces that will make up the series, and find someone to exhibit them for me!
Cheers....(and Happy New Year)....Les
