Anatoly Tsiris

Anatoly Tsiris

Anatoly Tsiris is a renown master woodturner from the Ukraine and for the last 30 years living in Charlotte, North Carolina. Anatoly’s love of wood began as a child and later as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. His discerning eye and intuitive spirit that guides the form on his lathe and gouge is entirely self taught. His shapes emerge from the personality and story already existing in the wood. Unlike clay, glass, metals and fiber where the material is shifted and rearranged as the artist instructs, the wood you see is exactly as it was created with its unusual grains, patterns and colors. Anatoly sees his job to follow the wood into shape, take advantage of opportunities and uncover it by a subtracting process. One is drawn to his turned wood pieces because wood is such an irregular material and lends an exciting unpredictably to the creative process and the discovery of new shapes. Wood turning is as much about selecting and finding as it is about making and constructing. His attraction to unusual pieces, ones that might look defective, flawed or irregular have the most drama. Because of his respect for trees as for all living things – his work does not contradict this philosophy. All the wood has been sourced from local trees with their stunning textures and grains which have been cut due to construction and development. Anatoly’s has extraordinary talent for meshing color, pattern, texture and form into a seamless whole.

Anatoly’s work has been exhibited throughout the US and is in corporate and private collections of the Mint Museum, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in Raleigh as well as galleries in North and South Carolina, Maryland and Georgia. He is also a McColl Center of Art affiliate artist.