• A proportion of “professional” turners have significant non-turning income. A substantial proportion of some turners’ turning incomes comes from demonstrating, teaching, producing paper- and screen-based content about their pieces and techniques, supplying turners, and promoting turning events.
• Some turners’ pieces develop and exploit particular techniques or design features. A proportion of these turners earn income by teaching others how to replicate those same techniques or features. Doesn’t this suggest that the income from the sales of the originators’ pieces may be somewhat fickle?
• There are still some turners, albeit a small number, who earn their entire turning incomes as subcontract (jobbing) turners.
• We only hear of the big-money sales, not about the pieces which don’t sell and subsequently clutter their turners’ homes.
The last part of Dunbar’s statement “the objects made by today’s turners are very expensive, selling for prices that will make the uninitiated gasp with disbelief ” suggests that those objects aren’t priced according to their cost of production, but are priced as if they were Fine Art. The separation of art into high-status Fine Art and lower status craft occurred in Europe during the 18th century. This is not the place to debate the validity of this separation despite its continuing influence, or whether it has been undermined by the subsequent expansion of Fine Art to include such as photography and jazz. But, even if the Fine Art market were as strong as Dunbar implies, can it continue to absorb at worthwhile prices the volume of non-useful turnings being produced?
A factor limiting the acceptance of woodturning as a technique which can be used to create Fine Art is that it uses a lathe, a machine whose raison d’etre is to produce round items quickly. These associations conflict with the widely assumed properties of Fine Art.
1.1.2 The influence of the media
An early catalyst to the growth in non-useful turning was the publication of Dale Nish’s book Artistic Woodturning in 1980.3 Its gallery section promoted the non-useful works of several turners. The success of these and other high-profile turners of the non-useful has been and remains a powerful encouragement to the growth in non-useful turning. But, as with the corporate need to build a brand, all professional artists know the importance of building a name. They know that some high prices are due to buyers believing that owning a piece by a name artist bestows status on the buyer, and makes it more likely that the piece will appreciate rather than fall in monetary value over time.
Fortunately the woodturning media rightly believes that in the 21st century it needs bling. Non-useful turnings and the associated techniques, equipment and personalities can provide that bling and much of the content needed by the media of a practice which has an almost static technology. Therefore professional turners of the non-useful have sensibly cooperated with the woodturning media to their mutual benefit. By doing so these turners promote themselves, sales of their pieces, and are more likely to attract teaching and demonstration income.
An unfortunate recent trend is to promote woodturning as fun. This undervalues woodturning which is really about learning, applying that learning, exploration, achievement and modest pride, even though these are sometimes accompanied by frustration and failure. Woodturning also offers opportunities for social interaction.
1.1.3 Today’s high-profile turners
Professional turners used to be working class; many had been apprenticed. Today some are tertiary educated, and/or are semi- or fully-retired and comfortably off. These turners may understandably be reluctant to work as jobbing turners once did, producing batches of useful turned building and furniture components and woodware, often designed by others, to order. Instead they’re more likely to promote themselves as artists who seek to turn what they conceive. Hobby turners are understandably attracted by this possibility.
1.1.4 The influence of woodturners’ associations
Professional turners of the non-useful have been and are hard-working and influential in woodturners’ clubs and regional and national associations. Not surprisingly this has and continues to influence the focus of those organisations and the types of turnings their members produce.
The memberships of the British and the American Woodturners Associations are in 2019 about 3,000 plus and 18,000 respectively. These totals are a credit to all past and present officers, although equivalent to only 1 in about 20,000 of their country’s populations. Had these two organisations focussed less on non-useful turning would those numbers be higher? It’s impossible to know.
1.2 THE RELATIVE DECLINE IN USEFUL TURNING
The relative decline in useful turning is in part a reaction to the factors discussed in the preceding section, but there are other factors which are discussed below:
• the influence of modernism
• the influence of suppliers
• the misbelief that the range of useful turnings is small
• wood supply and properties
• useful turning is perceived as less creative
• woodturning skills
• design
• demand.
1.2.1 The influence of today’s dominant design style
Today’s dominant design styles outside woodturning are variants of modernism, a style a century old and defined by Jonathan Woodham as “a ‘machine age’ aesthetic truly redolent of the twentieth century which, freed from the shackles of historicism, explored new forms and materials that were felt to be symbolically, if not actually, compatible with the mass production capacity of a progressive industrial culture”.4
Modernism’s now not-so-new aesthetic and its rejection of the “shackles of historicism” would if accepted by woodturners largely restrict woodturning’s role to producing a small number of turnings whose forms were composed of cylinders, cones and spheres. These are demanding, but boring, to turn by hand. Modernism has also been misinterpreted as a means to ruthlessly minimise cost by applying modern materials and techniques and by stripping away all decoration and ornament. Figures 1.4 to 1.6 illustrate this loss of delightful detailing.
Figure 1.4 A late 19th-century cottage rich in delightful detailing in Goldsmith Street, Goulburn, New South Wales.
Figure 1.5 Another view of the cottage shown in figure 1.4. Notice the turned veranda posts, gable finial, pilarettes, drop finials and patera. Alas the finial fixed on top of the gate post is recent and crudely designed, and the tops of the pickets aren’t turned, but moulded.
1.2.2 The influence of suppliers
Woodturning suppliers sensibly aim to keep selling to us, and in increasingly-greater volumes. One proven way is to promote new equipment which makes turning easier, an objective which I fully support.
A recent example of such new equipment is the sets of carbide-tipped scrapers introduced in about 2015. These tools do allow you to turn without