Lovespoons Wales

One of the most common questions I hear when people view some of my bowls - “they are very nice - what is their purpose?”  If they look nice, is that not purpose enough?  Can you not look at the grain in the wood and see the beauty and then stop looking for ‘purpose’ ?  If a picture is on the wall because it looks nice, can a bowl not be on your shelf because it too looks nice?

Some bowls are meant to be fruit bowls or salad bowls.  Some bowls are obviously made to be pot pourri bowls. Other work, is made to be pleasing to the eye, as was the platter, bottom right of the following page;  http://www.woodenbowls.co.uk/Bowls.html

When you look at a bowl hand turned from a burr, you are looking at the only one of its kind - it cannot be replicated.  In the same way, the spalt lines on a piece of spalted Beech, or a piece of spalted Birch, are natural and thus - unique. Whilst the shape can be copied, the spalting or burr formation cannot be copied.  The beauty of the wood, the naturalness of the grain, these are what makes the bowl an object of beauty,  these give the purpose, the joy, to the creation - the art.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Wooden Bowls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.