The Viking Sunset comes to the workshop
Colwin came to teach the Viking Sunset Bowl last weekend. If you've spent any time at all around contemporary turning, you'll have seen one. It's the late Nick Agar's design, and it's become one of those pieces that stops people mid-scroll: a bowl that looks as though it's been beaten from pewter and then caught the last of the evening sun. Colwin learned these techniques directly from Nick and teaches them with his family's blessing, which matters more than it might first appear.
Five students came for two full days, and a workshop that sounded of timber and texture, then the smell of colour and gilt cream! Our lessons always feature small groups so the tutor can move from lathe to lathe, watch a cut, suggest a small adjustment, and actually be heard over the extraction. Nobody was lost at the back.
Before any of the magic colour that the piece is famous for, there's a bowl to turn. So the day was spent on the curve, the rim, the foot, the patient business of taking a blank and finding the bowl inside it.
Then came the texturing, which is where people's eyes tend to widen when using the punches and other tools to create a unique pattern on the piece before airbrushing black and applying the gilt cream.
Day two is where the Viking Sunset earns its name. Airbrushed colour, layer on layer, building up that deep glow that seems to come from inside the wood rather than sitting on top of it. Then the gilding on the rim, which is the detail that lifts the whole piece. It catches the light and the bowl suddenly looks like something that belongs in a museum case rather than on a workshop bench. The care this stage demands is considerable. Rush it and it shows. Take your time and the difference is plain to anyone who looks.
A few of the group went on to make chalices alongside their bowls, working the same techniques onto a different form. It's a lovely thing to watch, the same language spoken with a different accent. The chalice gives the colour and the gilding somewhere taller to live, and the results were genuinely striking.
What stays with me from a class like this isn't only the finished pieces, though they were a sight to behold lined up at the end of day two. It's the room. Five people who arrived as (mostly) strangers and left having spent two days encouraging each other, comparing notes, laughing when something went sideways and quietly admiring each other's work when it came good. That's the part you can't put in a kit. Colwin brings the knowledge, the school brings the space and the lathes, but the turners themselves bring the rest.
If the Viking Sunset Bowl has been sitting on your list of things to try one day, that day can be brought a little closer. Colwin returns to the school again in October. Although it is sold out, we very occasionally get a cancellation. Join out mailing list (at the bottom of the page) to be told first if a space opens up.
My thanks to Colwin for two generous days, and to the five turners who made the workshop such good company. Pieces like these carry a bit of their maker in them. These five carry rather a lot.
