Summer is officially here which means it is harder than ever to commit myself to spending time in my windowless basement shop. Instead, we have decided to soak up some rays on Denman Island and relax - a perfect opportunity to do some retrospective updating for SawBendTwist.
Thanks to an extraordinary effort from my wife, we managed to get the “macrophylum” piece finished in time for the November start of the OneTree exhibit at the Robert Bateman Center in Victoria. It was an incredible showing of local artists and woodworkers. I was thoroughly amazed at the quality and diversity of the work that was displayed for the exhibit, and was honored to be part of it. A huge shout-out to John Lore at #LiveEdgeDesigns who is the mastermind and driving force behind OneTree. I was very lucky to have sold my piece early on, so was then able to relax a bit and meet the other artists and gallery visitors at a couple of the ”meet the artist days” hosted by the gallery. In February I was able to meet the folks that purchased my piece and help them get it up on the wall in their home.
Coming out of OneTree, we had a few commissions that I was able to wrap up in early March. Then - BOOM, over the weekend of March 14-15 COVID-19 hit, our spring break family vacation to Maui was cancelled, and my day job became all encompassing as I was part of the emergency response team tasked with managing our response to the pandemic. My home is small and the only space for me to set-up a home office was in my workshop, forcing a hold on all of my planned projects - I could just not get motivated to spend more time in the shop after crunching away on the computer for 9+ hours a day.
Now, four months later, I am happy to be back at my regular office and am starting to design new projects that I intend to tackle this fall. The next couple weeks of summer will be focused on fishing and spending time at the lake with family. I am looking forward to getting creative and letting the sawdust fly once again.