On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:11:07 -0700, TWW wrote:

Thanks to all of the people who passed long their experiences.

Just because I used the terms 'master' (since I was thinking of Zen
at the time) and the term 'great leap forward' does not mean any
'yet-to-be masters' who reads posts in this group are disqualified
from telling the rest of us what experiences causied the scales to
fall away from their eyes and better techniques to appear.
Enlightment may be gradual or sudden in the different Zen traditions
and I assume in learning how to turn it is the same. .

The current question evolved from an earlier question I posted on how
to notice torn grain before you put finish on a piece. The people who
anwered that post definitely helped the scales fall away from my eyes
and my bowls look much better thanks to those 'masters'.

I was lucky enough to pick up a mentor from this group, Chuck, alias
"WoodChuck"..
He's sent me wood, given me advice, looked at pictures of my work and told ma
both what I did right and wrong..

A huge breakthrough was when he was guiding me into a little different shape on
my bowls... Mine tended to have curved bases and almost straight sides, but I
really hadn't noticed that..

In practicing curves that ran more smoothly from bottom to top, I had the neon
sign flash in my head, saying something like: You have to cut a lot of wood off
the blank to do it right"

I realized that the reason that Chuck's work flowed and mine didn't was because
I was trying to get the largest diameter bowl possible from every blank.. and
not "waste" wood..
If you visualize a bowl inside the average blank, you will probably see how
little of the wood remains when the bowl is finished... I think my work got
better and seems to sell better when I began to shape things the way I "saw"
them, not the way I could get the biggest bowl out of the wood.. YMWV


mac

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