Intro
Ornamental Woodturning: Finding the Ingrained Stories in Wood
After many years of climbing trees from when I was five years old through to nearly seventy years old I have found trees, and the wood within them to contain myriad mysteries, and bountiful beauty. As an arborist for nearly forty years I had the ability to bring home interesting logs, mill them, and make furniture, cabinets, and occasionally toys for the children. My dabbling now and then with woodturning, mainly making functional items such as bowls and captive-ring baby rattles was rudimentary at best. At a woodturning symposium I ran into an older gentleman who it turns out was an "ornamental woodturner". Taken by the intricacies, and artistic creativity of his work I asked if he might allow me to visit his shop to see him at work. His reply was that at his age he 'had not turned anything in two years, and that he was unable to stand for more than an hour', but to come up anyway and see his shop. A four hour drive north into the beautiful rural parts of northern New Jersey found me on the shores of Culver Lake, looking as if I had been dropped into a shop stuffed full of the most varied array of full-sized, Tinkertoy-like "If you can imagine it, you can make it" devices, parts, and who knows what. My impression that first day was of being totally overwhelmed, surrounded by thousands of parts and pieces of machinery. An hour into my introduction to, and witnessing the workings of Harvey Fein's "Rocking-head, Incising Lathe" I was totally smitten by the magic and possibilities of the devices he had made over the previous twenty-five years. I exclaimed, "Harvey, I am thrilled to learn this! Will you teach me all of it?". To which he replied, "Not half as thrilled as I am that anyone wants to learn this; I thought it might go to the grave with me!". We agreed on a schedule for an apprenticeship, and I spent months traveling to and from his shop as I learned the ways of this genius woodturner. After I 'graduated' I purchased Harvey's unique lathe and tooling and the rights to his techniques, intent upon continuing his legacy. Harvey spends his time now mostly seated at his workbench, still creating through the medium of "Kumiko", the Japanese art of decorative joinery. Not one to lean on tradition, he now has expanded his exploration of the typical 2D art of Kumiko to 3D pieces.