artists biography
Metamorphosis by Kevin Wallace
An extract of a biography on Bud Latven published in Woodturning magazine, Guild of Master Craftsman
Publicat...
›› read full bio
An extract of a biography on Bud Latven published in Woodturning magazine, Guild of Master Craftsman
Publicat...
›› read full bio
Metamorphosis by Kevin Wallace
An extract of a biography on Bud Latven published in Woodturning magazine, Guild of Master Craftsman
Publications LTD, East Sussex, England, 2003.
Bud Latven has influenced countless artists and craftspeople with his approach to wood working, while following the path of a highly individual artist. He is an innovator, and the complexity of his forms might lead one to think of him foremost as a talented technician. Yet it is the ideas behind the pieces and the constant experimentation leading to their creation that truly sets him
apart.
Latven’s career in woodworking began when he moved to New Mexico in 1972 and took a parttime job at a woodshop in Albuquerque making cabinets and furniture. Soon, he began making his own furniture and within two years he had a fully equipped studio. For the next ten years he sold his furniture at galleries, showrooms and craft shows across the Southwest. His success in this endeavor allowed his to purchase land in 1978 in the Manzano Mountains in central New Mexico. For the next three years he designed and built a home and studio which rest at 7200 feet above sea level in a beautiful pine clad valley surrounded by National Forest.
In 1982 Latven’s woodworking career took a major turn. On a whim he took on a job for a small production run of stemmed goblets. He wasn’t familiar with the wood lathe at the time but the experience of wood turning made a life altering impression. It wasn’t long before he made the transition from furniture-maker to lathe artist. He was attracted by what he saw as an “unexplored medium that was open to interpretation and experimentation”. By working in a field that was not rigidly defined, he saw greater potential for artistic freedom.
Latven first started constructing wood turned forms based Mediterranean and Southwest stylized vessels taking his early inspirations from Native American ceramics. In 1985, Fine Woodworking magazine put a picture of one of Latven’s forms on the cover of the magazine, an event that introduced his work to a national audience.
Through the 1980s he participated in numerous national art and craft exhibitions and his traditional Southwest vessels gave way to more contemporary forms. “It was during this time that I started looking deeper into issues concerning materiality, surface and form,” Latven says. He developed a series of works that had silver rods piercing the walls and rims of the forms. He painted vessels and sculptural forms with juxtaposed raw and airbrushed surfaces and he sprayed melted metals onto tall anthropomorphic forms.
During these years, Bud Latven’s work had changed, but so too had the marketplace. As his work became more sophisticated and sculptural, he needed to focus on a marketplace that welcomed this kind work and find collectors with budgets to support work that required increasing amounts of time to create. He found this in high-end affairs such as the Smithsonian Craft Show and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show. As the field of contemporary woodturning took off, a number of galleries appeared on the scene and he was sought after to exhibit with the best of them.
By the early 1990s, Latven was thinking about developing a more definitive language of identifiable forms whose parameters were open-ended enough to allow for expanded creativity. For years he questioned the relevance and pervasive adherence to the concept of the vessel form in the woodturning field. It was then the he started to open out the bottom of his forms, many of which had become based on rotated curves and conic sections such as parabolas and ellipses. He made these forms out of segmented bodies with randomly placed contrasting elements and sections. “Over time, these contrasting sections became more and more pervasive in the forms until I realized that the darker contrasting sections were really an attempt to created visual voids,” Latven recalls, “it was at this time that I started carving out sections creating contrasting voids or negative spaces in my forms.”
The concepts Bud Latven explores feed each other, as ideas work back and forth between individual works. His current series of carved works explores concepts of disintegration, fragmentation and re-emergence. Works in his Tower series appear to be architectural, decaying and degenerate, while works in his Impact and Torsion series appear to be more fluid and dynamic.
In addition to being a highly regarded wood artist, Latven has a number of other noteworthy accomplishments. Besides designing and building his own home and studio, he spent his evenings for several years designing and testing a new innovative wood lathe traveling to Taiwan to work with engineers and manufacturers. Latven and his wife, Caroline Orcutt, also have a sideline business called The Bowl Kit Company that markets segmented bowl kits and plans to amateur woodturners and Latven offers several week-long workshops during the year for those who want to learn how to design, build and turn segmented constructions.
Latven's extensive resume shows that his turned works have been the object of numerous articles and exhibitions. The broader context of his work can be understood in the book Wood Turning in North America Since 1930 by the Wood Turning Center and Yale University Art Gallery. Latven's work is represented in many private and public collections including the Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington
›› hide full bio
An extract of a biography on Bud Latven published in Woodturning magazine, Guild of Master Craftsman
Publications LTD, East Sussex, England, 2003.
Bud Latven has influenced countless artists and craftspeople with his approach to wood working, while following the path of a highly individual artist. He is an innovator, and the complexity of his forms might lead one to think of him foremost as a talented technician. Yet it is the ideas behind the pieces and the constant experimentation leading to their creation that truly sets him
apart.
Latven’s career in woodworking began when he moved to New Mexico in 1972 and took a parttime job at a woodshop in Albuquerque making cabinets and furniture. Soon, he began making his own furniture and within two years he had a fully equipped studio. For the next ten years he sold his furniture at galleries, showrooms and craft shows across the Southwest. His success in this endeavor allowed his to purchase land in 1978 in the Manzano Mountains in central New Mexico. For the next three years he designed and built a home and studio which rest at 7200 feet above sea level in a beautiful pine clad valley surrounded by National Forest.
In 1982 Latven’s woodworking career took a major turn. On a whim he took on a job for a small production run of stemmed goblets. He wasn’t familiar with the wood lathe at the time but the experience of wood turning made a life altering impression. It wasn’t long before he made the transition from furniture-maker to lathe artist. He was attracted by what he saw as an “unexplored medium that was open to interpretation and experimentation”. By working in a field that was not rigidly defined, he saw greater potential for artistic freedom.
Latven first started constructing wood turned forms based Mediterranean and Southwest stylized vessels taking his early inspirations from Native American ceramics. In 1985, Fine Woodworking magazine put a picture of one of Latven’s forms on the cover of the magazine, an event that introduced his work to a national audience.
Through the 1980s he participated in numerous national art and craft exhibitions and his traditional Southwest vessels gave way to more contemporary forms. “It was during this time that I started looking deeper into issues concerning materiality, surface and form,” Latven says. He developed a series of works that had silver rods piercing the walls and rims of the forms. He painted vessels and sculptural forms with juxtaposed raw and airbrushed surfaces and he sprayed melted metals onto tall anthropomorphic forms.
During these years, Bud Latven’s work had changed, but so too had the marketplace. As his work became more sophisticated and sculptural, he needed to focus on a marketplace that welcomed this kind work and find collectors with budgets to support work that required increasing amounts of time to create. He found this in high-end affairs such as the Smithsonian Craft Show and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show. As the field of contemporary woodturning took off, a number of galleries appeared on the scene and he was sought after to exhibit with the best of them.
By the early 1990s, Latven was thinking about developing a more definitive language of identifiable forms whose parameters were open-ended enough to allow for expanded creativity. For years he questioned the relevance and pervasive adherence to the concept of the vessel form in the woodturning field. It was then the he started to open out the bottom of his forms, many of which had become based on rotated curves and conic sections such as parabolas and ellipses. He made these forms out of segmented bodies with randomly placed contrasting elements and sections. “Over time, these contrasting sections became more and more pervasive in the forms until I realized that the darker contrasting sections were really an attempt to created visual voids,” Latven recalls, “it was at this time that I started carving out sections creating contrasting voids or negative spaces in my forms.”
The concepts Bud Latven explores feed each other, as ideas work back and forth between individual works. His current series of carved works explores concepts of disintegration, fragmentation and re-emergence. Works in his Tower series appear to be architectural, decaying and degenerate, while works in his Impact and Torsion series appear to be more fluid and dynamic.
In addition to being a highly regarded wood artist, Latven has a number of other noteworthy accomplishments. Besides designing and building his own home and studio, he spent his evenings for several years designing and testing a new innovative wood lathe traveling to Taiwan to work with engineers and manufacturers. Latven and his wife, Caroline Orcutt, also have a sideline business called The Bowl Kit Company that markets segmented bowl kits and plans to amateur woodturners and Latven offers several week-long workshops during the year for those who want to learn how to design, build and turn segmented constructions.
Latven's extensive resume shows that his turned works have been the object of numerous articles and exhibitions. The broader context of his work can be understood in the book Wood Turning in North America Since 1930 by the Wood Turning Center and Yale University Art Gallery. Latven's work is represented in many private and public collections including the Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington
›› hide full bio
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