Finding beauty in the discarded

Others might see a discarded piece of wood as nothing more than compost or firewood. But Nathan Hart sees its potential for beauty.

Hart, who lives in Oklahoma City, is an artist whose medium is hollow-form turning, a method of shaping wood using a lathe. The 1983 Bethel graduate is the son of well-known Indian Mennonite leaders Lawrence and Betty Hart, and he credits his Cheyenne heritage with giving him “a high respect for nature. I can take wood that to others is discarded or useless, and see something beautiful in it.”

Graduating with a degree in industrial arts, Hart went into investment as a career but did woodworking as a hobby. “My original goal was to be a cabinet-maker,” he said. “The primary reason I didn’t pursue that was that it took a lot of equipment. But I did buy a lathe, and started turning small pieces for around the house.”

Eventually, he was introduced to hollow-form turning. “Think of pottery in the Southwestern style, and envision that made out of wood,” he said. “I really like hollow-form for displaying the grain of the wood.”

He works mainly with hardwoods such as maple, oak and walnut. “They are easier to turn and they cut cleaner,” he said. “I like any wood that has a burl pattern to it, which tends to be maple. I enjoy working with buckeye a lot. There’s also a tree that grows in Oklahoma that I like to use, the hackberry.”

People tend to see the hackberry as a “trash tree” and will cut it down, Hart said, which makes it easy for him to find wood to work with, especially since he will not cut a tree solely for the purpose of turning the wood. Hackberry has “a light, creamy color,” he said. And through a process called spalting, which invites decay in cut and specially sealed green wood, he is able to produce interesting and beautiful, dark patterns in the light-colored wood.

He gets his wood from a variety of sources. “There has been a lot of wood available locally in the last couple of years because of several bad ice storms we’ve had in Oklahoma,” he said. There also was a local road-building project that supplied him with material, and he likes to “follow the firewood guys around. They want the straight grain pieces that split easily, and I want what they discard.”

Occasionally, he does order wood, he said. “I’ve turned some of the rarest woods in the world, like pink ivory from [southern] Africa. No one is allowed to cut it—it has to fall naturally. I’ve heard that elephants will knock it down.”

About a year ago, he decided to pursue his art full-time. This requires him to enter shows and juried competitions all over the country, and that means paperwork, travel and keeping his inventory built up.

In the past year, Hart has shown and sold his work in Indian art markets and exhibitions in Oklahoma, Kansas, Arizona and New Mexico. His work sells for anywhere from $80 to $3,000, with most in the range of $300-600, he said. Hart has shows in Philadelphia and the Chicago area coming up in the next year. The latter indicate his attempts to branch out from the traditional “Indian arts” events, he said.

He will also challenge himself with a larger lathe, in order to spend more time carving and inlaying designs in his work. Currently, his pieces, mostly bowls, vary in size from five to 10 inches in diameter. The new lathe will allow pieces up to 24-inches-wide.

Hart said his Cheyenne heritage appears in the inlaying and carving of his bowls. Many of his designs, such as the morning star and the mountain, are not specific to the Cheyenne but how he uses them is, he said.

“Using wood is not [traditional] Cheyenne,” he said, and, in fact, few Indian artists use that medium. But he believes that the respect he shows for the wood and for its potential to be useful and beautiful reflect the deep love of the earth and nature that are part of his Cheyenne birthright.