Vogel (left) and partner
Kelly Zaneto stand with
’
vessels stacked on the
’
kind of wood from
g 1
which Vogel turned
’
them; smooth trunks
F t
yield subtle rings, while
hearts of wood where
multiple branches
connect create the
wild grain visible in his
•
cylindrical forms.
Eames’ iconic turned stool.
Vogel never abandoned the
lathe, but BDDW ’s growth left
little time for personal work.
Now Vogel has all the time in
the world to create. And he has
turned out a series of generously
scaled, crisply geometric forms,
including wide bowls, spherical
bottles, abstract double-gourd
vases, and fetching boxes. The
aesthetic is undeniably modem,
yet betrays his reverence for the
material. “One of the things I
love about my work is the con-
nection with wood,” he says.
“A tree, [before it becomes]
wood, is a living thing.
.. using
it as a material in an art form
eternalizes it.”
Earnest and soft-spoken,
Vogel grows animated when he
talks about his medium - how
the growth of a tree and its har-
vesting, for example, produce
tensions visible in a turned
piece that aren’t always evident
in a sawn board. His large-scale
sculptural designs celebrate the
subtle surface variations caused
by branches, fungus, even unin-
tended splitting, which he often
sutures with a butterfly joint.
For Vogel, adapting to wood’s
often unpredictable nature is
part of the beauty of the mate-
rial: “If it cracks up, to me it’s not
worth throwing out, it’s worth
fixing.” A large crotch of oak,
relieved of thick branches and
certain fate as firewood, sits on
the concrete floor of his work-
shop like a piece of statuary,
awaiting its turn on the lathe.
Vogel prefers working with
local woods such as catalpa,
maple, walnut, and sycamore,
and traditional, “close to the
wood” finishes. Tung oil, along
with bee and carnauba waxes
are BCM &T staples. For a set
of turned boxes in sycamore,
an unremarkable wood on its
own, he went to elaborate
lengths to carve radiating
Small Maple Turning
(2006) is a celebration
of irregular grain. It
measures 6 inches tall,
8 inches across.
grooves into the soft surface,
which he then ebonized and
brushed back to a mellow graph-
ite color. Like Moulthrop (also
an architect by training), he has
started using a polyethylene
glycol bath to cure large walnut
pieces - a time-consuming
Vogel’s lathe-turned
Beech Ball
(2010) is a
monumental sculpture,
weighing 250 pounds.
It measures 25 inches
in diameter.
apr/may
11 american craft 061
