[bluegrass music]
- Ed Moulthrop: I began woodturning when I was 15.
I was always carving wood.
Just the idea of working in wood as a material
was especially appealing.
- My father was always very artistically inclined.
He was an architect in his profession,
but in the late '50s,
he decided to try the woodturning
'cause he liked to make sculptures out of wood.
- This piece is obviously cut from a section
that had the root buttresses coming out.
And so you get that design.
- Our family does have three generations of woodturners.
First, my father was the first one
and when he began doing the woodturning,
he just began selling locally.
- The Signature Shop was officially opened in 1962,
and it grew out of Blanche Reeves' business
as an interior designer.
It was the beginning of the contemporary craft movement.
Many of the artists who started that movement
had other careers.
The making grew out of just a passion they had
of working with a material or a passion to make something.
Ed designed some buildings in Atlanta.
But the passion that he had for wood seemed to overtake
everything else that he was interested in.
And from Atlanta, it just kind of spread
across the United States with the craft movement.
- When my father began turning, the pieces he was making
were probably little bitty cups and plates,
maybe four inches in diameter,
but I think he had this urge to see,
could he go bigger than that?
And instead of just flat pieces or just shallow pieces,
he was able to make pieces that would actually curve over
and he could hollow out.
He invented his own tools and actually used a forge
and an anvil to bend these tools and make the tools
that he felt would help him in this turning process.
- Matt Moulthrop: When my grandfather
was creating this process, these tools did not exist.
And so he was learning along the way.
What you see us use today is an adaption
of what he created in the beginning.
He basically had to fabricate his own designs.
I'm always marveled at how he came up
with a lot of these things.
- You have to visualize it.
You have a 500 or 800-pound log here rotating.
- He was known probably best for the large pieces.
'Cause some of 'em were probably almost four feet
in diameter and maybe a three and a half feet tall.
- So this log, the original log
mounted on the lathe probably weighed 2,000 pounds.
- Matt: When I was a child, we would go
over to my grandfather's house, my brother and I.
There was a piece was photographed of his,
a large globe shape.
And in the piece, you couldn't tell the scale of it.
So they put an apple next to the piece,
and it didn't do it justice for how big it was.
People still didn't get the concept
of these were really large, architectural-sized shapes.
And so he put me inside the piece.
That was almost unbelievable to see a turned object
that large and that refined.
My grandfather actually posed in some of them as well,
some of the really giant turnings.
[saw buzzing]
- Philip: This gives me a round shape
to start the turning with.
And a flat bottom to put the face plate on
and then the whole piece will be mounted on the lathe.
My father always had said he would teach me
when I wanted to be taught,
and I made a few pieces of furniture.
And then I got into photography and then thought,
"Well, I should try the woodturning."
I was probably 30 when I started doing this.
I had gone to law school and I began woodturning
just about the same time.
It was probably early '90s when I went full time
into woodturning, but I slowly kind of weaned myself
off the law work from a five day a week job
down to four day to a three day to a two day.
And then I finally just left.
- Getting out of the law was like,
"Okay, so how fast can you do this?" [laughs]
You know, so that's, that was easy.
That was wonderful, so we did that well.
And if we'd have starved to death,
we'd have starved to death. [laughs]
- Philip: Is that holly?
No, that's-- - Matt: That's ashleaf.
Root of ashleaf. - Yeah.
This is a piece of ashleaf maple,
which is a true maple family tree,
but the common name that most people will know it is boxelder.
And it's a tree that grows all through the South
up the East Coast.
This red color, that's caused by bacteria that gets into the tree
causing the color,
but it doesn't seem to damage the tree at all.
The trees that we use all come from tree cutters
who have cut 'em down due to storm damage or construction.
They're not used for furniture or anything else,
but it does work well for woodturning.
So we have several sets of tree cutters
that we've known over the years.
And I always tell them, "Watch for this."
- It's a very soft wood and structurally,
it's not good for anything.
It's very striking to think a wood in the United States
has this bright color red in it.
[drill scraping]
- One of the styles that I'm known for mainly
is what I call a mosaic bowl, and it's a composite.
It's made of all these different pieces
of different types of trees.
Here's the ashleaf maple, the red-colored pieces.
Here's a piece of white pine in here,
here's a piece of plum over here.
It starts out, all pieces are going to be possibly
this thick in a big slab.
And then the slab is cut into the contour that I want.
The next one in the generation of mosaic bowls was this type,
which I call bundled because all these are bundled together.
So these are all cut to fit in a pail this size.
And these will be placed in here.
See, they stand on end, but I'll eventually
fill this whole pail up with the different pieces.
The resin is poured in and set.
And once it's set, it's gonna take the shape of this form.
In this case, it's a small two-gallon pail.
This whole thing will be rounded off into a round bowl
and hollowed out, and each of these pieces you see up here,
you'll see where they come out the bottom,
'cause this will all be cut into a spherical form
and then sanded and coated, just like a normal bowl.
Material that's filling in between the spaces in the wood
is an epoxy material.
And the reason it's black is you want something
that gives you some sort of striking contrast.
There is a number of people who are wood purists
who think wood should be made out of one type of tree only,
which is fine, but this is just a variation
just to try to get a different appearance using wood,
even though you may not know how it's exactly done,
but you can tell it's made out of wood.
That's kinda the message I was trying to get across,
that this is just the new way of looking at it.
- Some of the most beautiful turnings that's made
just came out of old stumps of say poplar and pine trees
that most people that make fine furniture
would never think about using.
A poplar would only be used maybe
in the back end of a drawer
or the bottom of a drawer, for instance,
and pine is ordinarily kind of deregated
as an inferior structural product.
But when it comes out of the lathe
of one of the Moulthrop family members,
it becomes a permanent thing of beauty
and a treasure in itself.
[file scraping]
- Philip: Now for our third generation, Matt,
who has a master's in business and finance,
when he finished graduate school,
he felt that he wanted to do the woodturning
'cause he'd been around it so long by that time.
I told him, "Well, there's no guarantees
"how this will work out,
but if you want to try it, you should try it."
So he's been doing that and has done very well at it.
It is unusual to have it passed down
through three generations and still be doing it.
- I'll be okay.
He's still my father.
He can still get on my nerves and I'm sure I drive him crazy,
but it's just part of the dynamic of family.
- Michael Heller: The Moulthrop family are three generations
that have worked with wood at the very highest level,
but what makes them unique in my mind is the fact
that they came to wood not as a primary goal.
There was a lot of education for each generation.
Ed Moulthrop, the patriarch of the family,
was a Yale-educated architect.
His son Philip is an attorney and his son Matthew has an MBA,
but they have all chosen their own way
to devote their lives to woodturning.
And I think that we have all been enriched by it.
- They had, for so many years, had worked alone
that when Philip joined in and then of course, Matt,
that was, he was so excited.
It was so wonderful for him because finally he had someone
he could really share everything with.
So he was very enthusiastic about that.
- When I left college, I didn't have any,
I don't want to say I didn't have any aspirations
to become an artist.
I didn't think I could make a living as an artist.
And I'd worked with my grandfather for over a decade,
apprenticing him, so I knew how to create work.
I knew the process, and it wasn't until I graduated college
and I had taken my first job and I really hated it.
- Matt was miserable in the traditional working world.
So when he decided to be a full-time woodworker,
I thought it was really a blessing
because he was so happy doing it.
He, you know, every weekend in college,
he came home and would help Ed and work in his studio.
And he loved it.
That was always where he was happiest.
And so when he decided that's what he wanted to do full time,
you know, you have to jump in with both feet.
- Be sure we don't come back and hit you.
- Matt: My wife Amanda was in law school,
and she had a job as a full-time attorney upon graduation.
So that was, she was willing to support me in the beginning.
- Carr: Their close-knit family
is probably responsible for Philip and Matt
having the same passion about working with wood that Ed did.
They grew up looking at things differently
because of their father and their granddad,
looking at things with a designer's eye,
or an artist's eye.
[lively cello music]
- The idea for this machine came to me
from watching the program on the astronauts at NASA
on how they make their gloves.
They would make a, like a plaster cast
of the person's hand.
And then they would take that plaster hand
and put it on a machine and spray it with latex.
This machine turned just about this fast and it sprayed.
And by doing that, you end up
with this perfectly even coating,
so there's no thick places anywhere.
They're all the exact same thickness.
And when I saw that, I said, "That would work well
with what we're doing here."
So came up with a motor and some gear ratios.
And this does about seven to eight RPMs,
which is as fast as you want to go with this.
- Each piece has four to six coats of finish.
The first coat is usually as thin as water.
It's almost as if it's a primer coat.
We can control the finish as to how thick or thin we want it.
We can make it set up in seven minutes or seven days,
depending on what we're trying to coat.
But after the final coat,
that's when we do the polishing of the pieces.
- Michael: Matt has enhanced the quality of the wood
by experimenting with different polishing techniques,
many of which are used in the glass
that we show in the gallery.
And they have given a different,
a distinctly different quality to the work.
His father developed a way of applying finishes
that made them very, very beautiful.
And Matt has now found ways of polishing those finishes
that enhance the work even further.
- Louis Sullivan: People in Atlanta and in Georgia
really have a great respect
and affection for Philip Moulthrop and for his father Ed
who developed the technique of the woodcarvings
of these elegant bowls.
And now his son has taken up the tradition as well.
These bowls are in the Smithsonian,
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Gump's in San Francisco has a sale of Moulthrop bowls
every year, and other things.
So we're very proud of the Moulthrops
as the creators of a proud tradition.
We're very pleased to have them here in Atlanta.
- Ed: As an architect and a teacher at Georgia Tech,
you make very little money,
and we were destitute most of the time.
And when I went into woodturning,
the market had opened up and I was able to sell them.
And for the first time in our lives, we actually made money.
- It's almost hard not to pick up a piece of wood and just
hold it in your hands and have this nice feel about it.
And I get that every time I pick one up.
- He loves people to appreciate 'em.
He loves people to buy 'em.
And he just enjoys that so much.
And then when I come along with my dish rag and say,
"I think I want this one, sweetie." [laughs]
And then he says, "Okay." [laughs]
- It has this feeling of still being alive in your hand.
And you can, sometimes you look at a piece of wood
and you can imagine something about the life of the tree.
- Amanda: It's constantly work.
And because he loves it, he doesn't mind.
I'm the one who has to pull him off the phone.
- One of the aspects that I love about the work that I do
is being able to extend the life of a tree.
This began with my grandfather, who created a piece
from a tree that Thomas Jefferson had planted.
- Michael: They have, I think, transformed to a large extent,
the woodturning field by their level of sophistication,
which is, in certain respects,
very deceiving when you first look at the work,
because there's a real simplicity to it.
But in that simplicity, there's an exquisite quality.
[upbeat string music]