Of all the artist’s media, wood is the most revealing of its origins: the splits, the knots, the rings, the grain—all these traits can carry through to the finished piece. For the master wood-turner Joshua Vogel, a co-founder of the acclaimed furniture workshop BDDW who started his own studio in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2008, that is both the challenge and the reward of the painstaking craft of shaping wood using a lathe. “I have many forms in my mind I want to create,” he says, “but once you start out on the lathe, you often have to let go of your intentions and let the wood tell you what it wants to be.”
Left: A sculpture made from white oak outside Vogel’s studio near Kingston, New York.
