TURNING WOODEN POTS

In a garage-turned-woodworking shop a few hundred feet from the Aztec Ruins National Monument, in Aztec, New Mexico, Glen Crandall is turning out wooden pots that are--each in its own unique way--monuments to the Anasazi potters of many centuries ago. Glen studied the forms and the designs of the ancient clay pottery masters and worked out his own forms and designs to produce wooden pots true to the Anasazi heritage.

It all started a couple of years ago, shortly after Glen retired, one of his good friends gave him a wood lathe. Glen began to "dink" around with the gift. Gradually, as he renewed wood working skills that had lain dormant for thirty years, ideas began to form.

For many years, Glen had studied Southwest art and archaeology as a hobby, especially that of the Anasazi. He had a special interest in the pottery of the Ancient Ones. This interest led him to designing and then to turning out wooden pots on the lathe.

Although Glen held jobs that required creativity and precision throughout his working life as an aerospace equipment fabricator and designer and, later, as a carpentry shop worker and foreman, his natural creative talents and his abilities to be precise have never been more handsomely challenged and expressed than in the pots that he has designed and turned out over the past two years.

Glen's pots are not wooden replicas of the various kinds of Anasazi pots or specific Anasazi patterns. They are his own designs. Each pot is a unique combination of form, design and kinds of woods. But, the Anasazi heritage is unmistakably there in each of the pots in different ways.

For example, the hues of the woods reflect the earth tones of the Southwest. The changing color of the woods grains as a pot is viewed from different angles reminds one of the changing colors of sandstone from morning, to mid-day, to sunset. The deceptively simple geometric patterns highlight the natural beauty and colors of the woods without over-whelming them. As a pot is held, stroked and turned, a richly pleasant tactile experience is provided to the fingertips by the pot.

Glen selects most of his woods from specialty stores, primarily Paxton's in Albuquerque. In the thirty, or so, pots he has made, he has used combinations of cedar, mahogany, walnut, maple, cherry, holly, lacewood, spruce, bloodwood, ash, padauk, satinwood, and purpleheart. Glen's designs usually require three or four woods of different colors and grains.

The process leading to a finished pot begins in Glen's head. He then makes preliminary sketches. As the rough "edges" are smoothed out in the sketches, combinations of woods begin to emerge in his thinking. When the final form and pattern of a pot take shape, each of the individual pieces necessary to attain the form of the pot and the designs in the pot fall into place. He then goes out to the workshop.

Construction of the pots follows lamination principles rather than veneer or inlay techniques. That is, each piece in the pot is the full thickness of that part of the pot. This process has required Glen to shape individually up to 320 pieces for a single pot. Some of these pieces, as can be seen in the accompanying pictures, are almost paper thin (perhaps 40 to 50 thousandths of an inch). It is this precision and the delicate nature of some of the pieces that help to make Glen's pots so unusual.

Glen feels that the ability to achieve what he has in the construction of the pots has required skills that he learned from working with both metals, where great precision and tolerances in thousandths of an inch were required, and through working with woods in different ways and at various times in his career.

Glen views his wooden pottery work as a retirement hobby. He does not have any particular philosophy for his creativity, his art or his craftsmanship. He has always liked woods and working with them. For example, he likes cedar because of the attractive patterns. He may mix woods with subtle grain and those without pronounced grain in a particular design for one of his pots.

He spends eight to ten hours working up the form of each pot and the design. His draftings are what he characterizes "as informal and rough." The precision comes with the cutting, shaping and finishing of the pieces into the final configuration of the pot. It takes him from fifty to sixty hours to complete a pot out in the workshop, including the cutting and gluing of pieces, the turning work on the lathe, the sanding, the varnishing and the waxing.

He uses standard wood glues, as opposed to urethanes. After the lathe work, he sands the pot down through several phases, ending with very fine sand paper. He then varnishes the pot. (Because he prefers the natural colors of the woods, he does not stain them.) Finally, he applies a standard, hardwood wax.

The wood in the walls of the finished pots varies from about one-half to 3/8ths of an inch thick near the bottom to about one-quarter of an inch, or less, near the top of the pot. However, to get a tight fit on some of the small pieces, tolerances between pieces are a few thousandths of an inch.

Glen has completed sixty pots. He usually has a back-log of orders. All of his early pots sold well in advance of completion. He intends to keep working with the pots until doing them no longer excites him. Right now, his favorite pot is always the "next" pot that has in his mind. That "next pot" is part of the motivation that keeps him working.

The pot he entered in the San Juan County fair in New Mexico took "Best of Show," even though there was not a category specifically for his type of work. With that successful showing in mind, he entered his work in the New Mexico State Fair and won a Blue Ribbon. As this is being written, he has entered a pot in the Northwest New Mexico Crafts Fair. He is considering entering one of his pots in the La Plata County Fair in Durango, Colorado and in the Colorado State Fair in Pueblo.

For now, the challenge of planning and executing the pots and the pleasure of receiving compliments from friends and others who see the pots are rewards enough for Glen who, in his retirement, has given quite a different meaning to going to "pot."

Biographical notes:

Glen was born and raised in a small town in Michigan, near Lansing. Both Glen's father and grandfather were carpenters. He always was interested in mechanical things. He worked summers with his father. After completing high school and getting married, he and his wife, Jan, moved to California in 1956. There Glen worked in a machine shop. Then, he worked for three years in an optical department for a company making gas spectrophotometers. The machine shop called him back to work on16 millimeter cameras to be used in the aerospace industry. In a ten year period, he moved from the shop to manufacturing/engineering and to testing. Finally, he became director of marketing. All of his jobs became supervisory. The cameras he helped design, build and market took many important space program pictures.

Although he never finished college, through the years, Glen did take college courses associated with his various job requirements.

Glen and his wife, Jan, finally tired of California and moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he worked for a major corporation.

After five years, he and Jan decided Colorado Springs was getting too large for them. They had visited Durango, Colorado, several times and decided to move there. After a couple of years of working in home construction, Glen took a job in the carpentry shop at Fort Lewis College in Durango. He advanced from an entry level worker to foreman of the carpentry shop. After about ten years, he moved into construction management at the college. He was at the college from1974 to1992. Shortly after retiring, the Crandalls moved from Durango to Aztec, New Mexico, in part because Aztec typically receives far less snow than Durango.