Inspiration from nature

Satoshi Fujinuma is a Japanese lathe artist who took part in the International Turning Exchange 2008. In this video he talks about his work and how he finds inspiration from nature for the form, texture and colour of his works.



You can see more of his craft work, art work, exhibition and other works on his website.

Meanwhile, Philip Streeting has published a document full of examples of how design inspiration can be taken from examples in nature. (18Mb pdf)

AAW Symposium 2007

Blogger Alan Irwin has been covering the 2007 American Association of Woodturner's Symposium in Portland, OR. So far he has covered day 1 and day 2.

The AAW have also published a lot from the symposium, the best in my opinion being the catalog from the invitational exhibition, Japanese Bowls: a western perspective, and Turning Green - An International Juried Exhibition of Woodturning.

Pysanky and Trypillian decoration

Yeah, I know. It's been a long time since my last post.

I recently got an e-mail from Philip Streeting of Woodturning Plus wondering why I hadn't posted anything here in a while. Apart from doing nothing but uninspiring work in the shop like bottle stoppers and coring bowl blanks, I have started a new blog A Somerset Family History and I'm giving SunriseTrail.ca a makeover. To make matters worse, I have just started building another garden shed. So until today I just haven't had anything worth posting here. Until this morning...

While searching YouTube for videos for my Craft Videos blog, I came across this video about decorating eggs:



I wasn't too excited about this until Eve started using an egg lathe. She used this and it's indexing head to mark out an egg ready for decorating with aniline dyes using a wax-resist technique called pysanky. This got me wondering if the same technique could be used on wood turnings? The most likely problem that I can foresee is that the hot wax (which is applied with a stylus called a kistka) will migrate along wood pores and leave a fuzzy edge. Has anyone very tried this on wood?

Most of the traditional Ukrainian designs don't do a lot for me, but on Eve's website she mentions a style called Trypillian.

The Trypillian people lived in the Ukraine 6,000 years ago. These eggs are characterized by the large motifs in earth tones.

I found some examples here that I liked, but the style was originally used on ceramics, and there are contemporary examples at trypillian.com. I can see how the spiral patterns may have been carried on in Celtic cultures.

So, some nice ideas there that might be applicable to woodturning. Right now though, I'm too busy to find out. Any takers?