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Trivial Pursuits
 Gattis turns to woodworking
 Photo by Wayne C. Moore When he’s not teaching industrial design courses, Tom Gattis can usually be found in his home studio, where he is sculpting out a reputation as a notable woodturning artist. By Monique Bos Published: Friday, October 14, 2005 Savannah College of Art and Design industrial design professor Tom Gattis is garnering recognition in the Savannah arts community and beyond for his woodturning work. His art is featured in the Telfair Arts Fair Nov. 4-6, and he also has been invited to participate in the upcoming Savannah College of Art and Design exhibitions “Small Works” and “Play.” In his workshop, built into the bottom level of his house, Gattis fashions bowls, lamp finials, boxes, chess pieces, wine-bottle stoppers and other objects. Woodturning is “taking a big hunk of wood and taking away everything that’s not this,” he said, holding a large burl bowl with two feet, part of his “Tilt Bowl” series. While the bowl is smooth and finished, it also retains knots from the original wood and varies in thickness, reflecting the organic shape of the material. “I tell my students sort of half jokingly, ‘Let the wood speak to you,’” he said. “It’s looking at a piece of wood and figuring out what it wants to be.” Depending on the wood — which ranges from African and Australian imports to cherry and maple — Gattis may approach a project with a sketch or idea in mind, or he may focus his efforts on revealing a design that seems inherent within the wood. “Some woods are more unique,” he said. “Sometimes the wood itself is just interesting … Other times it’s just ordinary stuff — cherry or maple, beautiful materials but nothing special about them.” As a prelude to his upcoming exhibitions, Gattis is planning to launch a Web site, www.tomgattis.net, Nov. 1 to showcase his creations. His work also is for sale at shopSCAD, 340 Bull St., as well as at The Cottage at the Oaks on Tybee Island and Wildcat in North Georgia. Woodturning is an old craft, Gattis said. “The technology really hasn’t changed much” since the Industrial Revolution, he explained. “Motors and steel have gotten better, but the machines are the same.” The history — or, as Gattis said, “the idea of this sort of lost craft” — is only one of the elements of woodturning that attracted him. “Growing up, my dad also had a shop,” he said. “I was around woodworking equipment. It’s sort of in my blood.” In 1996, he was teaching at Suomi (now Finlandia), a small private college in Michigan. At the time, he designed and built furniture in the college’s shop, but he became discouraged at the slow pace of his work. His department chair was a ceramicist, and often when they met for lunch he would tell Gattis how many ceramic objects he had completed during the morning. “I wanted that immediate satisfaction,” Gattis said. “You can do something in half a day or maybe a little longer.” So he turned to woodturning to provide him with a similar sense of accomplishment. “We had a lathe in the shop, and I decided I was going to do it,” Gattis said. He learned mostly by doing. During the early days, he said, he invested in books, videos and tools. He would read a section or watch a segment of video and then try to practice what he had learned. “Eventually, I started to figure it out,” he said. He continues to develop new projects and incorporate new materials, and his children have figured into some of the directions his work has taken. He began experimenting with sputnik sea urchin shells after seeing them in a shop he and his wife were visiting with their daughters, Sarah, 9, and Madison, 7. Now he uses various kinds of shells in lamp finials and other products. “There’s this market here,” he said. “We’re at the beach; we’re surrounded by water. People come here and want to take a piece of the beach home with them.” Another popular creation stemmed from a common childhood rite of passage. “My youngest daughter had lost a tooth, and I went down to the shop and turned a little box,” Gattis said. “In the morning she found the box and a gold dollar. Friends and neighbors found out, and suddenly I have a product.” Of his first batch of 12 “tooth fairy” boxes, six sold on the first day. He decorates the small boxes with seashells, chess pieces and other objects. While Gattis is devoted to woodturning — he logs at least eight hours a day in his workshop during the summer months and also spends many late nights and weekends there — he also is a dedicated professor. “I love teaching,” he said. “The [woodturning] process and approach to design parallel what I teach my students ... My skill base and knowledge of the industry help the students.” He also finds that woodturning provides a means to keep in touch with his artistic side. “As designers we have to stay active. We have to be creative,” he said. “There’s something physiological that happens. If you don’t have that opportunity to be creative, the world’s not right.” |
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