“A tree does not want to be a log or a bowl,” says Pleatman. “As soon as you cut it, it goes through drastic changes and it takes time.” It can take up to two years from collecting the wood to finish a bowl. After getting the logs to his studio, the next step is what Tom calls the “rough turn” on his 700-pound, two-horsepower lathe. As the wood spins along the lathe’s horizontal axis, Tom shaves it with a sharp gouge that he moves along a fixed support to reveal the outside of the bowl. When the outer contours feel right, he flips the wood and reveals the inside. Sometimes Tom can discover up to four bowls nesting inside one log.
Ranging from six inches to two feet in diameter, the rough-turned bowls are thick-walled and ringed with lines from the gouge. The generous proportions allow room for the wood to change shape as it dries without warping or cracking to the point that it is unusable. After a six-day soak in a dehydrating bath, the bowls are packed in baskets and carried off to the temperate climate of the cellar.
Six months to a year later, the seasoned bowls are ready for the final round of turning and sanding that refines the wood and removes any traces of the gouge. After several coats of tung oil and beeswax, (tung oil is made from the seed of the tung tree and is food safe) and a couple weeks on the drying racks, the bowls are finally ready to go home with people who love trees.
Pleatman’s appreciation for woodworking and trees is deeply ingrained. He grew up watching his father make banisters, spindles, and other woodwork as his parents restored their early 19th-century farmhouse in upstate New York. A seventh-grade shop class introduced him to bowlmaking, and he began experimenting with his dad’s lathe. When Pleatman left home for Haverford College, he discovered that his engineering professor had a wood lathe. Tom practiced making bowls with pieces of mahogany left over from the newly built field house.
Haverford’s landscape is the oldest college arboretum in the country. Thousands of magnificent trees, some dating back to the early 1800s, witnessed Tom’s daily walks through the college campus, teaching the impressionable young student wordless lessons about their beauty and character, their strength and vulnerability.
After graduation, Tom built a career as an electrical and software engineer, but he continued his woodworking studies. Nine years ago, he and his wife Jessica settled in Media, where Tom finally has his own lathe and studio. Today he devotes half his day to working as an independent software and web designer, the other half to woodworking.
The bowls are elegant and clean, without embellishments. “There’s a self-effacing quality about Tom’s art,” says filmmaker and Drexel University professor Dave Jones. “He’s not trying to show off what he can do. He wants to bring out the beauty of the wood, and the contours of a bowl give him a way to express that beauty.” Jones heard about Pleatman several years ago and was so intrigued by the relationship between Tom’s character and his craft that he made the 2005 documentary Beautiful Wood: Tom Pleatman, Bowlmaker. “Tom is authentic,” says Jones, “he’s honest.”
When asked whether his bowls should be used as vessels or viewed as art, Tom smiles and says: “Some people are eager to put things in their bowls. But others can’t put anything in it because it is already full.”
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