By Stan Wellborn
When Shirlen Heath took a high school shop class as a teenager, he turned two wooden table lamps for the family living room. After that, he didn’t work at a lathe for nearly 40 years, until he had retired from his contracting business in New Mexico.
Today, in a shop he built in the mountains in southwestern Colorado, Heath produces large sculptural turnings that fetch prices in the thousands of dollars. He works at a lathe he built himself, with tools he crafts as needed, using designs derived from Native American pottery.
He admits, a bit sheepishly, that he breaks most of the conventions of modern wood-turning practice. “I’ve never taken a wood-turning class, or joined a club, or watched any videos or attended wood-turning meetings,” he says. “I read a few books early on to get some design ideas, but that’s about it.”
A few years ago, Dale Nish — the Utah artist who has been at the forefront of the phenomenal growth in wood-turning over the last 25 years — saw Heath’s work at a craft fair and invited him to demonstrate at a national wood-turning conference. Heath politely declined.
“Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed by my tools and my techniques, and I’m not sure I could recommend them to others,” he says. “Whenever I needed something, it was just easier to make it out of whatever was within close reach and try whatever worked.”
That has resulted in a collection of equipment that is both unorthodox and inventive. One of Heath’s favorite gouges, for example, is an old tire iron, sharpened to a curved point. He attaches his raw wood to the lathe, using hardware-store nuts that he welds to surplus washers. His sharpener is a Sears grinder from the 1940s.
Unorthodox also is the word for Heath’s lathe, which most observers would walk past, thinking it was the frame of an old washing machine, which it clearly resembles. The device sat idle at Heath’s construction business for years. Built in the 1930s, the machine is powered by a 100-year-old half-horse power motor and belt pulleys.
“I told my buddies that when I retired I was going to take that lathe with me, to which they said, ‘Good!’” Heath recalls with a laugh. He hauled it up to the house he was building near Mancos and started turning around 1992 — mostly household items like rolling pins, as well as a four-poster bed.
In order to try his hand at turning larger pieces, Heath used I-beams left from a construction project to expand his lathe capacity. The original motor is bolted below the apparatus, and Heath —despite a bad back — has to bend down below the spinning work to turn the motor off.
Not long ago, the motor stopped working, and Heath took it to an electrical shop where workers were repairing large turbines. “No one had worked on a motor that old, and even when they took it apart, they didn’t know how to fix it,” says Heath. “I figured out it was the brushes that had gone bad, and I ended up making them myself. Now it works fine.”
A new motor, he acknowledges, would be smaller and more efficient, but he’s proud that he was able to salvage the original equipment.
Much of Heath’s shop ingenuity is a result of his years in the construction business, where he started in Albuquerque as a carpenter’s apprentice, then rose to foreman and supervisor before eventually starting his own contracting business, where he built large commercial and government buildings. “When the clock is ticking on the job, you find ways to get what you need fast,” he says. “That is pretty much true of how I do my turning. It’s often improvised because I just don’t know any better.”
To be sure, Heath is not just a stubborn iconoclast, ignoring all the latest advances. He readily volunteers that he could not get by without gap-filling instant glue or gallon cans of epoxy. A
6-foot-long crowbar handle has a sharpened edge of carbide steel on the end. He grinds turquoise and malachite into powder using a cast-iron mortar and pestle and a kitchen blender. And his shop is filled with the power equipment from a lifetime of construction work: table and band saws, drill presses and planers —and a potbellied stove his father built where Heath can burn his mishaps. “I’m sure if I had started turning in different circumstances, without working in isolation and at an earlier age, that I would be using all the latest tools and technologies,” he says. “But for the sake of expedience, I had to use what was available at close hand.”
Surrounded by thousands of acres of national forest and government land, Heath is able to collect most of his wood free of charge. Area residents are allowed to take dead or downed trees for use in everything from log houses to firewood. Just a few miles down the road from his shop is an aspen grove containing trees with trunks more than 30 inches in diameter. Most of his turnings are aspen, but he also uses cedar, cottonwood, big-leaf maple, elderberry, mesquite, locust and Osage orange. “Aspen can be difficult — it is soft and often punky — but the grain patterns are just amazing,” he says.
He turns his vessels to between one-eighth and one-quarter inch in thickness, making them translucent. He hand sands each piece with fine sandpaper and abrasive pads, then applies several coats of tung oil for a rock-hard finish. He often incorporates turquoise and other gemstones into his pieces.
Heath’s designs are based heavily on the proportions of native Indian pottery from the Zuni, Acoma, Santo Domingo and Santa Clara tribes — classic forms that he has been familiar with since his boyhood, when he hunted and fished in northern New Mexico. “I want soft, gentle curves, with no hard edges,” he says. “I let the wood tell me how it wants to be shaped, of course, but I think my eye feels most comfortable with the classic Native American bowl forms.”
In that respect, too, Heath defies convention. Because he wants a graceful line at the base, he refuses to turn a bottom rim or sand out the screw holes left from attaching the piece to the faceplate. “Only other turners notice that,” he laughs. “My buyers either never notice it, or they appreciate seeing a remnant of the production process.”
Heath compares turning a vessel to reading a good novel, usually with a surprise ending. He works to incorporate fissures, distressed edges, bark inclusions, wormholes and grain anomalies, such as spalting and burls. To emphasize the wood qualities, he often places compact fluorescent lights inside his turnings, marketing them as lamps and illuminated forms. In galleries from Taos to Telluride, his pieces usually sell for between $2,500 and $4,000, sometimes reaching close to $6,000.
Pricing his work has proven to be a difficult and mysterious process. When he began selling his work at craft fairs and cooperatives, Heath posted prices that he thought were reasonable and fair, and his pieces sold well. Then, other craftspersons and gallery owners told him his work should command higher prices, and he gradually began bringing his prices into line with the work of better-known turners in the Southwest. Two of his pieces recently were purchased for permanent collections in Farmington, New Mexico — at the Farmington Museum at Gateway Park and the Henderson Fine Arts Gallery at San Juan College. (View the Henderson pieces at sanjuancollege.edu.)
“I must admit it bothers me a lot when people who like my work can’t afford it,” he says. “The whole process involves market pressures and ego and trying to gauge what one’s time is worth. The fact is, I’m semiretired, and I would be turning whether I sold anything or not, but the marketplace seems to be the only place where you can determine the value of your labor.” He also admits that he has many pieces that he values highly that have remained unsold for years — in part because he has priced them at what he believes they are worth.
But even with beautiful pieces on his shelves, Heath still looks forward to creating more. Each morning, he heads to his shop and his lathe, where he picks up a piece of burly aspen or mesquite and begins. By the end of the day, he will have finished another turning — and he’ll make no apologies for using an old tire iron in the process.
Stan Wellborn is director of public affairs for a Washington, D.C., nonprofit research organization. He also has a vacation home near Mancos, which is served by Empire Electric, and enjoys spending time in Colorado.