Paul Russell - Utah, USA

Join us as we talk with Paul Russell, one of the demonstrators at this year's AAW symposium in Chattanooga, TN. 

A transplant from San Diego to Utah, I’m a maker of 35 years with a passion for woodturning. My career with wood started at a young age and is always inspired by life’s simplicity, patterns and textures. While woodturning has been a longtime love, Paul Russell Designs is a more recent endeavor as my work has taken a more serious and artistic turn. I still appreciate my legacy heavy rustic bowls. However, more recent works focus on the line of the natural edge bowl, thin wavy platters, or extreme twig pots made from limb elbows and bends, or extreme natural trunk shapes. This latter work I refer to as my Barely There Series – and you can see why. It all started with a piece of Lilac branch rescued from a firewood pile, becoming the first in the series. The series reveals beauty in the otherwise ugly and unusable, exploiting ideas of negative space, while utilizing defects and imperfections to accentuate. Inside is outside!