Firebowl –

Firebowl - Side View

First off, this is not really a fire bowl meant to hold fire. But it is a fire bowl. Let me explain.

I took a class in pyrography to further my ability to enhance the surface of the bowl, vessel or sculpture I was working on. Being no great artist myself, I became fascinated with the different burning patterns that pyrographers use. I went to the Internet and researched all I could.

Firebowl - Top View

I became fascinated with burning Braille or morse code into the surface of a piece (still waiting for the right piece on that one). I also found some old cartographer’s symbols back in the day before maps were printed in color. But I got sidetracked when I found some artwork by the late John Warangkula Tjupurrula.

John was an aboriginal artist from Australia who pioneered the dot art technique in modern paintings. I became fascinated with both the bright colors and strong but simple shapes used to tell a story in the painting. I particularly liked the fact that most of the canvases were painted black instead of white. Black was my favorite background color for a bowl. So off I went exploring aboriginal dot art.

Firebowl - Bottom View

I had a bowl that I had cut out of oak. The grain was nice, but not great. Plus, this piece didn’t develop any nice cracks to embellish, so I thought I would try my first attempt at dot art.

It was a disaster. Getting all of the geometric forms to line up and complement each other instead of competing with each other was a lot harder than it looks and very time consuming. I spent the better part of three days painting and the end result was so disappointing that I sanded it all off and started over. But I waited about three months as I looked at more and more dot art. Then it dawned on me that I was trying to translate two-dimensional dot art (usually painted on cave walls) onto a three-dimensional object. Eureka!

Like a globe, I divided the bowl into a north and south pole with an equator. I painted the north and south pole separate and used the equator to pull the two regions together. Success! This time it took about five days of painting and hunting through the art stores for just the right brushes. And unlike a traditional canvas, you can’t just paint over a mistake…you have to sand the bowl clean and start all over. So needless to say I was very very careful.

After laying down the red lines for the circles, I started in with the white dots that really define the piece and are the hallmark of aboriginal art. Now that’s a lot of dots. Well over two thousand. Whew! But it was worth it. I chose a concentric circle as my main design element. It can mean various things in aboriginal art, like man, fire pit, camp site or fruit. So I chose fire. That’s why I call it fire bowl.

Firebowl - Close Up of Dot Art

There’s something very primal about it yet inviting. I’ve noticed that people just have to pick it up and turn it over and look at it. There is a resonance to this ancient art that echoes around even our far removed culture. This has quickly become one of my favorite surface embellishments. So look for more complex and colorful and interesting pieces in the months to come.

Hot Cross Buns – $69

Hot Cross Buns Side View

Hot cross buns,

Hot cross buns,

one ha’ penny,

two ha’ penny,

hot cross buns.

Remember that old children’s song? I didn’t. Not until I was making this piece. I usually work up pieces that it takes two hands to hold, but a client wanted a series of pieces that you could hold in one hand. So I started out making things about half the size I normally make. The problem was that the surface treatments I was using, cyclone fencing, baling wire, fence staples, upholstery tacks and screws were all perfectly scaled for larger pieces, but imperfectly scaled for smaller pieces. What to do?

I had a nice piece of cherry wood, so I started this small piece and then stood back and looked at it. It didn’t have any special grain to it, so I cut the shape where it was interesting in itself, but it needed some surface treatments. So I took a round burr in my dremel and randomly attacked the bottom half and decided that I would drill a series of holes in the top for some twine in a cross pattern, much like the hot cross buns. I wanted them to be perfectly spaced, so I used the lathe’s indexing feature to get it just right.

Hot Cross Buns Top View

A note about Hot Cross Buns: ‘A hot cross bun is a sweet, yeast-leavened, spiced bun made with currants or raisins, often with candied citrus fruits, marked with a cross on the top. The cross can be made in a variety of ways including: of pastry; flour and water mixture; rice paper; icing; two intersecting cuts. They are traditionally eaten at Easter but in the UK they are now sold all year round’. Google it if you want more info.

I treated the outside of the vessel with some Lamp Black Oil Paint, I let it dry for a day, then took a series of rags and rubbed as much of it off as I could. This left a remarkably smooth finish with the black sort of blended into the grain, leaving it a warm blackish brown or brownish black, depending on how the light hits it. A fortunate happy accident.

I took some white paint and filled in the holes along the bottom but tried several pieces of twine to try and get the crosses at the top to look right. Nothing worked. Then I remember what my fellow artisan over at Long Hollow Leather had told me about working with rawhide. It’s as stiff as a piece of wood, until you wet it. Then it becomes like a cooked spaghetti noodle. Almost too noodle-like really. I mean have you ever tried to push rope? It’s the same principle. So after soaking in water for a couple of days, the rawhide was ready, but not so willing.

Long story short, I “coaxed the wet rawhide into the holes marked for the crosses, but I couldn’t tie them off, and knots were out the of the question in such a small confined space. So, on the inside, I tacked them down with superglue. A tedious process. Once the rawhide dries, it’s as hard as a drum skin, so I think all of the hard work paid off. The light cream color of the rawhide accented the brownish black (or blackish brown) finish perfectly.

I’m a happy man, and the finished piece looks gorgeous. Good enough to eat!

Smudge Pot – $89

Smudge Pot View #1

Back in my childhood days, when the construction crews did their thing and have to leave up barricades, they didn’t have the battery-powered flashers that they have now. They put up smudge pots. These pots sort of shaped like squashed bowling balls, only a little smaller, and they actually had a flame coming out of the top. They looked like a throwback to medieval times.

This was one of those onion-sized pieces I like, and I spun it right down the center on the lathe. Gave it a good sanding them put a round nose bit in my router and held it up again the side and created a chatter effect along the side with both the router and lathe spinning in opposite directions. This carved out some nice areas that I filled with black paint and sanded off. Some signature cracks around the neck and some upholstery staples to bind them up, and my little smudge pot came to life.

Smudge Pot Top View

Whirl About – SOLD

View #1

This came from some Black Locust I found by the side of the road by the Mayor’s house. I guess he was clearing some trees. Really wonderful color and grain to this wood. But I didn’t want to do just another bowl.

 

I had done some outflowing forms before, but I really wanted to try and exaggerate this one. So I made the top really broad and the bottom really skinny. Almost too skinny for it to stand up on it’s own. But as luck and nature would have it, as the piece dried and warped, the rim became wavy and the stem sort of slanted and those forces counteracted each other and she stands up on her own.

From the side, she looks almost like a twister, what with all of the pockets of color in the grain looking like debris a tornado picks up and tosses around as it moves along the ground.

Top View showing this remarkable grain pattern

I sanded all of the knots and surface defects smooth, then literally gave her a 20-minute bath in a mixture of Orange Oil and Beeswax. She really soaked up the pampering and after wiping off any excess and polishing her up with a soft cloth, she’s ready for center stage anywhere, especially where someone can crotch down and get a good look at her profile.

Who knows? I may wind up making it a gift to the Mayor!

Side View showing how the piece warped and tilted

P.S. Oops…Sorry Mayor, this one is SOLD.

Heartbeat – SOLD

Heartbeat View #1

One of the things I’ve been experimenting with lately has been taking pieces that my have boring grain and giving them a boost of color. That’s how Heartbeat got started.

 

One of my more popular pieces is roughly the size and shape of a large onion. Being from the south, I would say it’s a Vidalia Onion. It’s just a nice pleasing shape and fits comfortably in the hand. It is familiar, even if you don’t handle onions very much.

This piece had spectacularly boring grain, so I wanted to cut it and paint it a bit. This time I used I took my Automach and a wide slightly carved spoon chisel and sliced along the equator of the piece as it sat on the lathe. I then finished hollowing it out and gave it a good sanding and set it aside to dry. Then coated it in the Brick Red Milk Paint. Taking a claret piece of sand paper, spun it on the lathe and cut back as much of the surface paint as possible. Then pared off the bottom and set the piece aside for a few days to dry.

My signature cracks came along, but this really wide split opened up. Since I was growing to use cyclone fencing to fasten belly staples the scale was fine. But for the smaller cracks the cyclone fencing was out of scale. So I rummaged various hardware stores until I found some black upholstery staples. Perfect!

But I was a little worried about the red color. It just didn’t have the contrast that I wanted, but I decided to go ahead and finish the piece and hope for the best. The upholstery staples worked great, but I can’t fashion them as well as I can the cyclone fencing, so I had to be a lot more exact with my marking, drilling and hammering. But I was pleased with the result. Still the lack of contrast between the red and the subtle red tones of the natural wood were bothersome. That is until I hit the piece with a coat of shellac. As I layered on more and more thin coats, the piece began to pop, and became lustrous and aged at the same time. My daughter said that it made it look really old, like it had been around since ancient times.

Alternate View Showing Chiseled Equator

So Heartbeat was born. The reds became redder and the aging of some of the other wood tones really make the piece look like it was recovering from quite a battering. Battered, but not broken.

In the process, I learned not to give up too soon on a technique and incorporating different scale of staples to bind the cracks was a great new addition.

The Staples Superbowl – $90

Staples Superbowl View #1 - A total of 39 staples!

Sometimes you find funny things when you start spinning and cutting a piece of wood on the lathe. You get to see some of the tree from the inside out. You can find bark buried deep in the wood’s structure that never saw the light of day. Sometimes you can even find a limb that never quite popped out of the trunk as a limb. All this and more is what I found in this little piece of wood.

This is from a Beech that was split in a storm. I thought the whole tree had fallen when I arrived with my chainsaw, but really, the main part of the tree had split and the massive logs were really limbs! Now the old time woodturners tell me that the checking and cracking in a limb, as compared to the tree’s trunk is sometimes exponentially more severe. And its true!

I centered the limb on the lathe and turned this one out and left the interior limb I discovered intact. So I had to cut the piece of little thicker than normal so as not to blow out the side with this added “feature”. That meant more severe cracking than I was used to, and coupled with the fact that wood in the limbs have a lot more tension in them, this piece was in for a wild ride as it dried.

The back of Frankenstein's head!

I wanted the piece to have that sort of wobbly round bottom to it. I put a random series of cuts long the side to get it a little more character. So I carefully finished it off, sanded it out to 600 grit, gave it a buffing of wax and then watched it transform before my eyes as it dried. Cracks and splits like you wouldn’t believe. I took a picture of the bottom after I inserted a series of staples and it looks like the back of Frankenstein’s head!

Staples Superbowl Tree Limb Inclusion

Oh1 And don’t forget the side with the limb trying to stick out.

Since the wood has such a light color and nice grain pattern, I left it with a natural finish and just a buffing of wax. But to enhance the cracks visually, I took out my Detail Master and inserted a blade heated to 1,000-degrees into the splits and burned the cracks, making them a dominate feature. I also burned around the 39 staples I inserted to give them a little more of an organic look. I just about ran out of staples. This one would never make it through a metal detector at the airport.

This one I really thought would crack completely in half before I was finished hammering in all of the staples because I had to use a ball peen hammer, but she survived the ordeal. Beaten but not broken, making this truly a Superbowl!

Piece measures 5.25 x 5.25. 

Staples Superbowl Side View - Beaten but not Broken

Survivor – Donation to Hope Clinic for Women for Christmas Auction

Cross Hatch Stitching

This piece is from a red oak that fell during the massive flood that hit Nashville and Franklin in May of 2010. Just down from Crackpot Studios, the weather station recorded 17.63 inches of rain on Saturday and another 9.13 inches on Sunday. Like the spectacular mudslides in Malibu, California, hillsides, heavy with mud and water and trees, dramatically and suddenly, dropped hundreds of feet.

Stitching with Brads

This red oak was one of the ones that slid to the edge of a 200-foot drop and lay on it’s side for months, it’s roots firmly in the fallen hillside and the rest of it sticking straight out into space. When I came along with my chainsaw and freed it up, the wood gave out pops that were as loud as gunshot reports when all of the tension was finally released. Most of the tree finished it’s tumble to the rocks below, but enough was salvaged to make a few pretty good bowls and platters.

Survivor Bowl Close-up of Inside Detail

This one was cut from a sweet spot just off the center, and was wide enough and just deep enough to make a great fruit bowl. I had turned one like it years ago and it sits on our kitchen counter holding whatever seasonal fruits and vegetables we may have on hand. It is particularly pretty when loaded with apples, or this past summer’s harvest of roasting peppers from a friend’s garden. So that is the new life for this tree. Holding in it’s hands nature’s harvest.

Survivor Bowl Close-up of Stitching

The bowl is slightly oval in shape, as bowls cut from fresh wood inevitably warp slightly as they dry. I then finished off the surface with a freehand basket weave burned in a band near the top. There is my signature crack along the rim so I drilled and burned out suitable holes and stitched them up using waxed sinew and weathered brass tacks. The surface I hand sanded and polished with tripoli and finished off with a high speed buffing of carnauba wax to highlight the spectacular grain.

Survivor Bowl Close-up of Brads and Stitching

I donated the piece to the Hope Clinic for Women in Nashville. You can find out more about the great work they do at www.hopeclinicforwomen.org. They gave it a notable place in their year-end fundraising auction.

Just like their clients, this little bowl is a Survivor!

Piece measures 11 inches wide by 3.5 inches deep.

Pass The Salt! – $20

These came about kind of by accident. I was just killing some time in the shop with some left over red oak billets. (I made some custom croquet mallets and had used the oak for the turned handles.)

Anyway, I made a small salt box that we use in the kitchen and on the table. We load up our favorite salt and when cooking calls for salt we reach for the salt box and measure out what we need or grab a pinch or two. Some friends were over at a dinner party recently and liked the idea so much they wanted some for friends and family. So I got in the Salt Box business.

Each is cut from a 3×3 red oak billet and measure about 3 inches tall. After I cut off the top and hollow them out, I decided to burn in a couple of lines using some old guitar string from Shuff’s down the street. Then I fired up my detail master and burned in some freehand patterns. Finished up with carnauba wax after placing a small rare earth magnet to keep the top secure.

A great way to showcase some of those expensive artisan salts that are out there now, and looks oh so stylish on the dinner table. They make great gifts! And no two are exactly alike.

They work for black pepper too. You can order yours by emailing me at crackpotstudios@gmail.com.

Hope Bowl

A friend of mine was getting remarried. It was a wonderful time for the broken pieces to be mended, so I offered up one of my crackpots as a wedding gift. It’s red oak from my family farm down in Mississippi. A big chunk of limb was broken off in a sudden storm (Did someone say metaphor?)

So my brother and I salvaged a few pieces and this one made it into a nice pot that developed almost two identical cracks on opposite sides. So I stitched one in waxed thread and the other I fashioned staples from cyclone fencing and inserted them after heating them with a propane torch.

After hammering on the staples a little I covered the back of their holes with some fine chckory coffee grounds and some glue to give them a little more character.

Since this crackpot is basically being mended by string and wire, I thought that was a nice symbol for his marriage.

Rosebud – SOLD

Reclaiming something thrown away, changing it and giving it a new life is one of the great things I like about what I do. This piece came from one of the many Bradford Pears that get knocked over in storms around here. The way these trees grow, they just branch out so much and the storm winds just twist them like screwing in a light bulb and something’s got to give. So the tree breaks and folks cut them up and put them to the curb to be hauled to the landfill.

When I spy them before the garbage guy gets them, I’ll pick through for pieces that it makes sense to turn into something other than firewood. This is just such a piece. This was a crotch from a tree where several limbs came together. And as I was cutting it, the shape of a rosebud sort of emerged, so that’s what I went with. It really started splitting on me before I was finished, it was that weak, so I bound it up and finished it and let it dry.

As a decorative feature, I drilled some holes in it and inserted some walnut and poplar dowels. Big bad bold splits emerged then closed up some as it dried. I then got some lacing and stitched up a couple of them, but saw some twigs on the ground and the idea of using them to bind the area around the hole came to mind and so I nailed them into place and sanded them down smooth.

It gives Rosebud a little more character and helps her find a place of prominence.