Читать книгу Mike Darlow's Woodturning Series: Useful Woodturning Projects - Mike Darlow - Страница 14

Today’s dominant design styles outside woodturning are variants of modernism, a style a century old and defined by Jonathan Woodham as “a ‘machine age’ aesthetic truly redolent of the twentieth century which, freed from the shackles of historicism, explored new forms and materials that were felt to be symbolically, if not actually, compatible with the mass production capacity of a progressive industrial culture”.⁴

Modernism’s now not-so-new aesthetic and its rejection of the “shackles of historicism” would if accepted by woodturners largely restrict woodturning’s role to producing a small number of turnings whose forms were composed of cylinders, cones and spheres. These are demanding, but boring, to turn by hand. Modernism has also been misinterpreted as a means to ruthlessly minimise cost by applying modern materials and techniques and by stripping away all decoration and ornament. Figures 1.4 to 1.6 illustrate this loss of delightful detailing.

Figure 1.4 A late 19th-century cottage rich in delightful detailing in Goldsmith Street, Goulburn, New South Wales.

Figure 1.5 Another view of the cottage shown in figure 1.4. Notice the turned veranda posts, gable finial, pilarettes, drop finials and patera. Alas the finial fixed on top of the gate post is recent and crudely designed, and the tops of the pickets aren’t turned, but moulded.