Artist’s Statement

I’m an avid outdoor enthusiast. Camping, hiking, cycling, scuba diving are all activities I have enjoyed for years. This has put me in close contact with nature’s amazing diversity of creation and beauty. Natural themes and patterns play significantly, though often subtly, in my woodturning, and this is the underlying thread connecting all of what I’ve done. Often contrasting natural elements against a very controlled line, I find ways to represent harmony between nature’s creative hand and man’s. I typically try to arrest the viewer first with nature’s creative identity, then allow the revelation of my manipulative involvement to dawn. Whether it is presenting the profile of the entire log around a bowl form, or playfully displaying the delicacy of flowers enhanced with the pattern and color from within the wood, finding the best way to present the intricate and yet often simple details of nature’s work prevails. Occasionally employing colors and textures to highlight natural character, I conspire with the material, to offer fresh insight to the viewer.

It’s an exciting challenge to author forms that blend the simple circles a lathe produces with the complex symmetry of nature. There are rarely perfect circles in nature. A raindrop landing in a puddle, the once a month full moon; these may be examples. Is it the ephemeral existence of natural circles which makes the form so attractive to the human eye? It’s a shape that has proved incredibly functional to mankind. In art, the stark simplicity of a circle can magnify the complex harmony existing between an infinite number of shapes, of curves, and yet never stand out as a bold component in itself. This may be the circle’s role in nature. Through woodturning I apply this concept within the forms I create.