|
About:
The Wood
This turned and hand carved urn is made of the African variety of Padauk
Pterocarpus soyauxii.
While turning, this wood has a sweet vanilla smell and the shavings are brilliant red. With all of the natural oils contained in the material, it is necessary to prepare it before employing any joinery.
The sapwood (white part) is actually very waxy.
Padauk wood is most sought for the construction of drums and hollow musical instruments
because of its intense resonance qualities and its most important quality;
its brilliant red beauty. As time goes by the brilliant crimson color develops into a very rich purple.
Agro Forestry Tree
Click to a database to learn more about the tree in its habitat.
Top
I acquired the material at The Woodery which is the only supplier of exotic wood in
Central Massachusetts. It was passed over for some time because most people looking for Padauk want it for musical instruments. In this case the grain pattern didn't work for the neck of a guitar, but when I saw
it I fell in love.
At the shop I started off with plans to make it into an vertical grain piece but as I
studied its patterns closer, the consistency of the sapwood's taper struck me. I figured that I could really make something different and the beginnings of what you see in the pictures started to formulate in my
head. To test my theory, I had to take a chance and cut it into stackable pieces so that I could start visualizing it outside of my head. Of course the design continued to evolve over the course of the following
days.
After rendering it into a turnable block, I started to shape the outside profile.
As the knife cut deeper, the darker patterns that appear at the urn's equator began to come forth where the adjoining blocks' oils mixed. In certain light, the patterns create a desert landscape effect, so I cut a little deeper, more than I originally intended to capture as much of it as possible.
Making that change meant losing capacity, so I had to come up with a modification to how
I would turn the foot. My first idea was to carve the legs on the very bottom. By allowing the bottom to stay wider and by reorienting the legs out and up, I created a bigger block to hollow therefore regaining the capacity I lost in the first cut. At 4000 rpm, the legs disappear and in one instance I got careless for a split second and whacked my thumb a good one.
I got over it and continued.
The neck was simply going to flair out, but I for some reason, I don't really know why,
thought it would be nice to add the ring detail. It just seemed like
the right thing to do.
I began turning the top like a sphere but it seemed like it wanted to be a flower so
I carved it into a flower
| 
