I continue to enjoy my two 500 bowls books. I consider them a bargain
and I'm glad I bought them, but I wonder if I really got 500 bowls in
either book. All the pieces pictured are beautiful, but are they all
bowls? I think woodturning needs a new and agreed upon category such as
'wood art' or something more appropriate.

This musing isn't another litany about art invading craft or about pipe
bowls or toilet bowls or the Rose Bowl. It's about the turned wooden
bowl; not platters, not basins, not cups, not vases, not hollow forms,
no matter how fine they can be.

To qualify as a turned wood bowl, I think the object should have at
least a hint of its wooden ancestry. It should have some evidence of a
rounded cavity of enough depth to at least appear capable of holding
liquids or solids. It can be so gorgeous or fragile as never to be
used, but its origins as a utensil ought to be, to some degree,
discernible.

I count hollow forms as vessels, not bowls and their beauty and appeal
are not in question here. I do not believe that turners necessarily
_'progress' from making bowls to making hollow forms. Or for that
matter, neither do they necessarily -'graduate' from the spindle to the
faceplate. All are just different aspects of woodturning. The open bowl
form does provide a special surface for displaying the wood, the finish
and the turner's expertise. A bowl's cavity can hold its own against the
'mystery' of a vessel with a narrow orifice.

After all, a turned wood bowl by any other name is still a bowl, but I
think it's time for interlopers to have their own name. Arch

Fortiter,


http://community.webtv.net/almcc/MacsMusings