I have enjoyed working with wood as long as I can remember. That was one of the reasons that I became a carpenter a few years after I finished college. As things go I didn’t stay a carpenter long. The companies I worked for decided that my abilities were better utilized managing and overseeing construction projects. So I hung up my hammer and picked up a laptop. My work took me from Boston to Honolulu and Calgary to Miami and a lot of places in between. After retiring from a long career as a construction project manager I decided to return to what I really enjoyed – working wood with my hands.

While I was working I took several classes with Mike Dunbar at the Windsor Institute to learn how to build Windsor Chairs. It was my idea at the time that after I was done with my career I would retire to my place in Vermont and spend my time skiing in the winter and making and selling chairs in the summer. It sounded like a great plan at the time. But things don’t always go as planned.

 One of the things that I really wanted to become proficient at was turning the legs and stretchers for the chairs I was making. Although I could easily buy sets of legs from the Windsor Institute I felt I could not say the chairs were truly built by me using legs bought from someone else. So, for quite a few years I would try time and again to turn legs, running into issue after issue. And because I was only able to find time to turn on weekends – and only those weekends that something didn’t need to get fixed on the house or something else important was going on – the learning curve was very gradual. Many times I would spend half a day just trying to figure out where I left off two or three weekends ago. It was only after I retired and could spend several days in a row at the lathe, was I able to finally learn how to turn legs that I considered good enough to use in my chairs.

But as we learn about one thing it often sparks an interest in a related subject. That’s what happened with me and bowls and hollow forms. While I was trying to learn how to turn spindles to make the chair legs I became fascinated with all of those interesting forms people were turning and decided that I really wanted to learn how to turn them. Turning chair legs and building chairs took a backseat to my learning how to turn bowls and hollow forms. I have been producing a variety of different forms and styles from plain bowls to basket illusion platters and bowls, segmented forms, live edge bowls and various types of hollow forms.  And I’m still making chairs. I never seem to lack something to do. Between skiing, snowshoeing, hiking, sailing and kayaking there are always bowls and hollow forms to turn or chairs to build.