I wanted to show a few pics of this here alder table I carved. It was a long process but it came out nice...I'll be telling more about it in the next few posts...I wired it internally hence the lit up non apple non iphone windows...

bandsaw safety, how I got started in sculpture...and woodwork...

My sculptural odyssey started when I was almost 30. I’d always liked going to art shows and museums, but it wasn’t until I went to one outdoor art show in the Norfolk VA and I saw a lady trying to sell what looked like junky tripe to me for 1-3k dollars, I began to think hmmm I think I could make nicer stuff than that!!!

So I splashed plaster all over our tiny apartment making life masks and body casts of wife, relatives, and friends, anybody who wasn't moving too quickly. I played with clay, cement, and other media..after several years we finally upgraded to a real house with a garage that became my workshop and then I started buying and borrowing woodworking tools. As  one of my woodworking spiritual fathers, Sam Maloof allegedly once said-‘if someone that had $15,000 to spend and wanted to get into woodworking and I had to tell them how to spend it, rather than sending them off to an artisan school I would say, take that money, buy yourself a shed ful of tools, experiment and teach yourself. ‘

Well, I didn’t do that back in 1996, but I did buy a cheap crappy bandsaw and a cheesy below-contractor -grade table saw that nearly separated me from my fingers several times. As one friend of mine said when I told him that I like to do woodworking…’Hmm, can’t have been at it long, you still have all your fingers!!’

That, in my humble yet highly biased opinion, is the most important thing to learn 1^st and foremost about woodworking, safe working procedures. Even a bandsaw, normally a very safe tool, can cut you seriously if you don’t follow basic safe working procedures, ie don’t have your hand in line with the blade as you are pushing, if you are cutting a small piece of wood and your hand is getting anywhere near the blade use a push stick, use extreme caution when cutting anything that has a  rounded shape as it can bind suddenly in the teeth and flip towards the blade in a violent fashion, as I have seen several times over the years. Again, if your hand is in line with the blade and it flips forward, you can easily lose a finger or 2. I’m way too vain and my fingers mean too much to me to be parted from them, I’m really attached to them..

Anyways, buying that crap bandsaw introduced me to how much fun it is to cut curves in wood. I made scads of folk toys for my son from a book my wife got me, I made a nice inlaid mirror for my wife..

My experimentation phase started when I got out of the Navy in 07. I had tragically decided that I was going to become the white boy known worldwide as the Caucasian tansu maker. Talk about  the tiniest nitch market conceivable, I mean, you would really have to intentionally ruminate and ponder and think about 'what is the tiniest market segment I could possibly aspire to make things for?' This reflects how much fondness I have, however, for those amazingly beautiful antique Japanese cabinets.. I further euphorically and misguidedly decided that additionally, I would teach myself to make the metal fittings, the drawer pulls, even the lock plates, I spent weeks and weeks screwing around with different apparatuses to try to make locks, to etch metal, tried to figure out how to blacksmith, how to make my own drawer pulls. What an amazing amount of wasted time, I think somebody must have been adding crack or LSD to my morning coffee, to make me think I could pull a business like that off. The only people who still actually buy tansu are Japanese people and they certainly won't buy any from a crazy wild-eyed hirsute white dude who is most definitely not descended from their sun god (IE, I'm not Japanese, since they are very Nippon-centric and deeply respect and value their own culture, it's gravely in doubt as to whether any of them would consider for even a second to buy from a non-Japanese...). YET it wasn’t wasted, I learned a lot…for example, I learned that I  intensely dislike cabinetry proper, real, regular cabinetry,  all those right angles and perfectly fitting joints stymie me and grind me down…I realize now that I’m much more comfortable doing the sculptural forms of woodwork, the really precise measuring and precision fitting of drawers to carcasses just isn’t my thing..So I spent almost a year fruitlessly heating and beating metal in my shop to the point of giving myself tendonitis in both arms, I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on equipment, tools, torches and blacksmith paraphernalia that now sit idle in my shop (but look really cool), and after a year we got to the end of the money saved...that feverish dream about tansu lasted several more years 'till I actually built  a couple of them, at which point I realized that it just...wasn't...going...to...happen...dang.

This is a decent one I made, I designed the steel work and did everything on this..incredible amount of work...

HI folks, just wanted to load a few photos showing the progress on what will be an Airborne Ranger tribute table, living in the land of the free courtesy of the U.S. Army...I intend on making a shield insert and lighting this table up, as in adding a light source in the void in the center of the table. The first table you see is the  NOT I-phone NOT Apple product, I made an iphone clone on the top, a non functional non removable phone that lights up. More photos to come. Please feel free to check my website, www.tylerartwork.com...I'll have these tables posted on etsy, and you can see some of my progress on youtube-just go to youtube and search shawn tyler or tylerartwork...blessings

In the beginning was the wood..and I began to carve

   
Hi all, this is a running catalog of my artistic pursuits. Depending on my mood I sculpt (wood, or concrete, or porcelain, or plaster), I make furniture, I write, I write music, I help people. I ramble on about my techniques and will probably post some photos ….so if you want to learn how I do some of what I do, hang around. Be blessed and enjoy..and feel free to write me.

Andy Warhol said’ just make art! Don’t worry about whether it’s good or bad, leave that to the so-called critics, and while they are thinking about it, make even more art!!!

Or something like that. I could google the quote and have it correct in about 2.3 seconds but I’ll leave it as attributed.

I’ve been in the process of making a pear-pod docking table, complete with a non-functional dock, that has a plug in jack, to which I wired several LED sockets. These LEDs are strategically placed within the table to give a quaint mood backlight to some glass that I fashioned to fit a void that I cut into the table in the shape of a pear with a bite taken out. This table is sort of a takeoff from Isamu Noguchi, he made a few tables including a very elegantly carved one that he stack-laminated a shocking amount of wood, carved it and sanded and polished to a high degree of finish. There is quite a bit of wasted wood doing this type of a table simply because you take a good sized board, cut the successively smaller disks out of it, stack and laminate them together….but considering that this is recycled wood that I purchased from guy who had had it in his shop for about 30 years it was about time to take the wood and give it a life as a piece of furniture..

Carved wood has a very small corner of the art world, *think Henry Moore* but holds an even tinier segment of the furniture world. Wendell Castle was and is one of the few people who dared to try to bridge that chasm between art and art that actually has a functional purpose rather than to just sit in the corner and `collect dust. In the 70’s Castle made a few tables with carved acoutrements on top, for example he made one table with a carved book and a pair of ‘reading glasses’ also carved out of the same wood as the table.. He made another table that had a set of keys and a key ring carved and laminated onto the top of the table, and yet another table with a pair of carved gloves adorning the table, again, carved from the same type of wood as the table.

I am a huge fan of Mr. Castle and my thoughts were leaning toward the idea of doing a few pieces along the lines of what he did, just updated for the 21st century. Seeing as how I was once an electronics technician by trade, wiring up LEDs or even other types of electronic silliness is easy for me, and I imagine that I’ll be exploring more of that later…maybe a table with one large button that, when pushed, gives a prerecorded cryptic message…or maybe a recording that shouts STOP!  when the button is pushed...or maybe gives an electric shock to see how Pavlovian people can be...

My table is carved from alder. I got a massive pile of hardwood lumber (for a price so cheap I should have been charged with robbery) from a guy who was basically shutting down his wood shop, including some mahogany, alder, a couple massive boards of poplar  and some amazing ribbon shimmery black cherry that is so beautiful I want to cry when I look at it.