- Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan and welcome to ARTEFFECTS.

In our featured segment, we meet South Lake Tahoe based artisan, Malcolm Tibbetts.

After decades spent honing his woodworking skills, Malcolm has mastered the craft of segmented wood turning.

With it, he turns and shapes wood into head turning 3D mosaics.

(bright music) - My name is Malcolm Tibbetts.

I grew up in northern New Hampshire, and I was blessed by only being a thousand feet away from my granddad.

He had a wood shop in his basement.

He taught me how to pound a nail into wood when I was about four years old, and I've been a worker of wood for over 70 years since then.

You have woodworking where you make things out of lumber, then you have wood turning, and the most common example of that would be to take a chunk of wood and make a salad bowl out of it.

Segmented wood turning is when you take perfectly good boards and cut them all up into little pieces, put them together, and then turn it.

I arrived in Tahoe on the 4th of July 1971, got a job in ski patrol at Heavenly Ski Area.

Met my wife who was the first aid room nurse.

I was a ski patroller starting off.

We bought our first home, had no money left over for furniture, bought a cheap table saw and started making furniture.

It takes a lot of equipment to do segmented work, and because I'd made so much furniture, I had acquired a wood shop full of equipment.

As soon as I knew how to remove wood on a lathe, I started gluing wood back together and shaping things on a lathe.

It's an art form not practiced by a lot of people.

The National Association of Wood Turners, the AAW, it's made up of probably close to 20,000 members.

But within that, there's probably only maybe five or 600 people that pursue segmented wood turning, and there's very, very few that achieve a level of where they can sell their work and so forth.

I'll come up with something in my head and then I'll get out some graph paper and I'll start sketching.

I'll make a rough blueprint.

I'll calculate dimensions and angles.

I keep an inventory of different species of wood, pick and choose my wood, start cutting stuff to accurate dimensions, start gluing things together.

It requires a lot of accurate joinery, a lot of precise angles and gluing techniques.

And of course, you also need to know what you're doing at the lathes.

You can spend a week putting something together.

If you don't know what to do on the lathe, you destroy it all.

Once you've finished turning it, you sand it smooth and you put finish on it and hope somebody likes it.

There's always little surprises when you work with wood.

The grain, the color, you can pick up a hundred pieces of steel and they're all the same.

A few years ago, I started playing with colored wood.

It's wood that goes through a process of stabilization in a vacuum chamber while I take a piece of white maple and turn it purple two inches through.

So now a lot of my work has got unnatural colors, pink and yellow and blue wood.

The biggest enjoyment is the initial designing.

A lot of rough design work happens before I go to sleep at night or before I even get out of bed.

I live, eat and sleep this stuff.

Once I've designed a piece and I start working on it, what drives me is to get to the next piece.

I'm always looking at possibilities, endless possibilities.

It really accurately describes what it is we do as segmented wood turners.

We're uninhibited to make anything we want.

(bright music) My favorite type of work is when I come up with a piece that has a message.

One of my most successful social conscience pieces was a piece called Rocky Road Ahead.

It's a segmented ice cream cone with a globe of ice cream on top of it with the polar caps dripping all over the cone.

My wife and I celebrated our 50th anniversary just a month ago.

To commemorate that, I made her a wood turning, but a special wood turning.

Do you know how many days there are in 50 years of marriage?

There are 18,262 days.

So the wood turning I made has 18,262 pieces.

Nobody's gonna know that except for me and her and now the world.

I learn something from every project I do.

There's no perfect piece.

I was totally self-taught for the first year, made a lot of mistakes where I bit off more than I could chew and I ended up spending several days or more on a project.

What do you do?

You throw it out and start over?

No, you learn something.

Buckminster Fuller is one of my heroes, if you will, and one of his quotes, which I really like, you can never learn less.

Every once in a while you come up with a piece that, yeah, this one works.

There's this one I can get behind.

There's joy in that.

- [Announcer] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Rafealli with Bill Pierce Motors, Heidimarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

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