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I
was born in Henderson , Nevada in 1954 and grew up in
Boulder City . I moved with my family to Buckeye, Arizona
in 1967 and have lived in Arizona ever since. You can
see my preference for native southwest forms in my work.
I live in Phoenix and am a member and a past president
of the Arizona Woodturners Association (AWA). I am a member
of the American Association of Woodturners as well.
I
have worked in the graphics industry for the past 30 plus
years and am currently a graphic designer for a microelectronics
company in Phoenix , AZ.
I
remember doing a lot of turning in high school and still
have the first piece I turned, a leg for an elevated cutting
board. In the late 1980’s I started taking an adult
woodworking class to make round frames for stained glass
art I was doing at the time. The class was sponsored through
a local community college and was held in the wood shop
of a nearby high school. The classroom was small with
about 25 students. I sometimes had to wait in line three
people deep to use one the big pieces of equipment (table
saw, band saw, etc.), but they had five nice lathes that
nobody ever used.
I
remembered how much fun it was to turn and started bringing
in scraps of wood to practice turning. Soon after that,
the instructor showed me an article in Fine Woodworking
about segmented turning. I thought I’d give it a
try and made some real crude segmented hollow forms. I
thought it pretty neat to be able to turn a hollow form
from a flat board. I joined the AWA and learned to process
found wood and haven’t done much segmenting since.
I
had bought my first lathe through a high school auction
and have been turning ever since. I currently have a big
Oneway and a Jet mini that’s so old it’s blue.
I
am mostly self-taught. In 2001 I took a woodturning course
taught by Phil Brennion (a turner I greatly admire) at
Yavapai College in Prescott , Arizona . In a critique
of some of my work at time, Phil’s commented that
my work ‘looked like it was growing out of the table.’
From that point on, I strive to make a clean fair curve
around the bottom of my hollow vessels.
Today
I use mostly found wood. There is quite a variety of wood
here in Phoenix thanks to irrigation, mesquite, carob,
olive, African sumac, ash, pecan and desert ironwood to
name a few. Most of it is not very big, maybe 10 to 15
inches in diameter, but I think the extreme climate conditions
give it some tremendous figure.
I
have work in a couple of galleries in the western U.S.
My work is in collections through out the U.S. , Europe
and Hong Kong .
Check
out my website at http://paulporterwoodturning.com/
and you can contact me at paul@paulporterwoodturning.com.
About
the photo: My barber of 15+ years was fatally injured
in an automobile accident a couple of years ago. I had
let my hair grow in homage to him and partly because I
was too lazy to find a barber who could deal with curly
hair. At about a year and half without a hair cut, I decided
to get it cut. Besides it was August in Phoenix , hot
and humid.
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