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Featured bowl - from the archives
( now in a private collection )

In April of 2020 I carved this black cherry bowl and after being on display at Northern Michigan University's DeVos Art Museum was shipped to its new owner in Mexico City.

"Cherry Nest"
wild black cherry - 14-1/2" x 10-1/2" x 4"

It had been a couple of years since I'd carved any bowls but that fall while cutting firewood I came across a couple of trees that begged to be remembered by being made into bowls. This bowl began as a large, heavy (at least 50 lb.) piece of black cherry. You can get an idea of how much wood was  removed. For scale, the carving bench top is 24" square.

  

I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go with this bowl; a shallow bowl suspended by a three-footed base. The bowl itself is captured but separate,  secured by extensions upward from the base. I started on this bowl in early January and it was finished around the middle of April, 2021.

Click on the image above to see larger photos.

Photos and larger images of some of the bowls I have carved over the years.

     "What I would like to do before it is too late is to get this across to a few craftsmen-to-be who will work after me, and also to a public which will be there to receive them, because we are living in a time when, I believe, this is important. 
     Fine things in wood are important, not only aesthetically, as oddities or rarities, but because ... much of our life is spent buying and discarding and buying again things that are not good.
     Some of us long to have at least something, somewhere, which will give us harmony and a sense of durability -- I won't say permanence, but durability -- things that, through the years, become more and more beautiful, things we can leave to our children"
                                        James Krenov -- "A Cabinetmaker's Notebook"