Natural, ethereal at every turn
By Janet Eastman
November 22, 2007
ANN EHRINGER is a modernist at heart, but today in her sleek Santa Monica living room, she is holding a link to ancient history. In her cupped hands is a small wood bowl. Behind her, displayed like fine china on glistening white shelves, are 150 other hand-turned vessels. Each was sculpted out of chunks of exotic wood: white sycamore from Ireland, cinnamon-colored erable from Canada, deep koa from Hawaii. Some are smooth with a shiny polish; others are rough. One made of rich maple burl has a ragged top and walnut strips that act as stitches across a gaping hole.
“The bowls represent what is absolutely natural: wood, grown and aged,” says Ehringer. “Sometimes there are holes where there were knots. To turn a bowl with less than perfect wood is an art. To get it to expose its flaw without breaking its thinness is a wonderful act to witness.” Some of her bowls are as small as a silver dollar with sides as thin as a dime’s. Others are large enough to hold a family meal or conceal a possession, their original intention.
Ehringer, a businesswoman who owns the Saddle Peak Lodge restaurant in Calabasas, bought her first hand-turned bowl in 1959 in Kauai. She used it at home to serve salads. Years later, while visiting New Zealand, she saw another exquisite bowl. Although she did not buy it, “it ignited something in me,” she says. “I thought later, ‘the next time.’ ” Since then, whenever she travels she looks for one to add to her collection.
Her latest find, from the Hawaiian island of Molokai, is a foot wide of pale Norfolk pine with knotholes forming a smiley face. A few of her bowls were sculpted from wood that was still green; over the years, as the wood shrunk, their openings changed from perfect circles to ovals and oblongs, which adds to their appeal. “They are wonderful to look at and touch,” says Ehringer, running a finger around the lip of an asymmetrical bowl; a swollen half-ring marks one side like a scar. “I feel an elemental connection with the wood.”
Jan Peters, who has been selling artistic woodwork for more than 20 years at del Mano Gallery in Brentwood, says, “There is a natural human response to wood, and we intrinsically understand it. A vessel speaks clearly by its simple beauty. A good artist brings that to light without overshadowing it.”
Peters, whose gallery has wood pieces by artists from 12 countries, says collectors today evaluate the way a wood turner exposed the inherent qualities of the grain and embellished the surface. Bowls by new artists, she says, can start at $200; work by master wood turner William Hunter of Rancho Palos Verdes can be priced at $35,000; for works by Mark Lindquist of Quincy, Fla., prices rise to $100,000.
The popularity of collecting hand-turned bowls has increased since the mid-1980s, when, says Peters, the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery exhibited some of collector Edward Jacobson’s holdings. “The Art of Turned-Wood Bowls” show and the book based on it resonated with people, she says.
Ehringer prizes her collection so much that she designed her interior to showcase the bowls. Her home is white, modern, spare and comfortable, with deep-cushioned sofas, chrome-frame chairs and glass tables.
“I don’t have wood-framed furniture,” she says. “That was a conscious choice not to take away from the beauty of these special objects. These bowls are the centerpiece of my house.”
She can rattle off the types of wood she sees on her shelves as if it were the alphabet: avocado, banyan, camphor… .
Most of Ehringer’s collection comes from Hawaii, where she has a second home. Many, called calabash bowls, are inspired by the bulbous shape of gourds.
These feast bowls were once hollowed out with sharp stones and coral and were reserved for Hawaiian royalty until 1819, according to research conducted by the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. After it was made legal for others to own them, they continued to be valued. They were named after a chief or ancestor and passed on through generations. Sometimes, a child is named after the bowl and is responsible for life to care for it.
“Butterfly-shaped wooden pegs were inserted at weak spots and at splits,” which is the case with the museum’s calabash bowl, says Bowers assistant registrar Julie Perlin Lee. “Instead of being viewed as less than perfect, these types of repairs were seen as marks of beauty.”
Ehringer has spent time watching wood turners employ gouges and scrapers on dips, bumps or flat sections and their artistic eye to create graceful curves. Turners have keen ears too. They can detect a faint tick-tick sound indicating very thin wood.
Her collection includes work by Hawaiians Dan DeLuz and Jack Ewing. Many were gifts, such as the banana-shaped bowl made from a kiawe tree. “The bowls remind me of where I was and who I was with,” she says.
Ehringer has 35 bowls – made from monkey pod, kamani, koa and tamarind – by DeLuz, who lives on the Big Island. A group of 63 small bowls he made sold last year to a collector for $46,000.
“He is a big man who stands at his lathe all day long with sawdust and shavings up to his knees,” Ehringer says. “It takes real sensitivity, a great touch and exploration” to turn a block of wood into a delicate bowl. “How far does he want to go with this. How far can he go? I’ve seen a turner go right through a bowl trying to go too far.”
She speaks poetically about the bowls, reaching out to them.
“There is something about them that reminds me that I really believe in long-term relationships,” says Ehringer.
“The bowls go on and on. I have had some longer than I’ve had my two grown children. They will outlast us all.”