Transluscent Norfolk Pine Vessel

Description

Ron Kent’s first career was as an aerospace engineer. He switched to trading stocks full-time after he realized that his former lunch-hour hobby was more lucrative than his day job. Until Kent retired from trading in 1997, he was a stockbroker who moonlighted as a master woodturner.
Kent built his reputation as a woodturner with carefully balanced, translucent footed bowls. These vessels—created from Kent’s signature material, Norfolk Island pine—achieve translucency by virtue of extremely thin walls that have been imbued with oil over the course of repeated treatments. Translucent Norfolk Pine Vessel carries on this tradition, but with the addition of deliberate fissures that Kent has “repaired” with copper braid. These stitched works form a series the artist calls “post-nuclear,” a reference to a damaged future world in which new things would be stitched together from broken remnants of the old. Kent finds this new direction as pleasing as his more traditional vessels: “Even while I bask in the comfortable ‘rightness’ of the fundamental forms, I welcome the nagging discomfort of the ‘stretched envelope’ of the unexpected.”
from the exhibition Nature Transformed: Wood Art from the Bohlen Collection, June 12 – October 3, 2004