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A Turning Journey
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: April 2024
A lifetime of learning has led to Hamp Stevens’ endlessly beguiling woodturned artworks. He’s ready to share the wisdom and the vision.
Hamp Stevens. wood-turner and mathematics aficionado, has amp in his high-powered name; in fact, everything Hamp says and does is loaded with amplitude.
Hamp is a sixth-generation South Georgian. His father was an agri-business man, his mother an artist and clothing designer. Hamp inherited their determination, craftsmanship, and natural curiosity, so inventions and challenges were, and still are the things he wakes-up and falls-asleep with.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, to pay for his education at University of Georgia, he became an ironworker. Upon graduation, his brother became his business partner. Together they built a successful steel erection business in heavy construction: bridges, power plants, etc.
He laughs and says, “I was even forced to learn civil engineering.” Add to that acquiring a degree in business.
Building new companies seemed to come naturally to Hamp. In 1996, before all was said and done, he bought Leonard’s Losers (popular sports magazine and radio show). He owned a 400-acre Turf Farm. He holds a United States Patent on a Turf Grass Planting Machine, a sophisticated apparatus he manufactured and sold worldwide. He started and financed a ball cap company. He financed and helped start a bio-tech company.
“In the mid-1990s, I was a professional commodities trader,” added Hamp. “I owned a seat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. For several years, I was one of those people who scream at each other on the exchange floor. Business is real simple up in Chicago: you take people’s money – or they take yours!”
Along the way, Hamp explored the mathematics of spheres, cubes, pentagonal and triangular solids, and pyramids taught by Aristotle and Plato. Combine his fascinations for 3-D math, wood-turning, and woodworking, and he can safely claim-his-fame of being one of a very few people on the planet who can turn the magic he does.
And what is even more amazing – he wants to share those skills with any man or woman who is an accomplished woodworker and woodturner with a willingness to measure carefully. Hamp’s done all the research, the math, sorting out the means, the materials, and the history of this exciting turning-journey.
All that said, if you can wood-work and wood-turn, you can make an eye-popping, jaw-dropping, sculptural treasure in a matter of a couple of days for the cost of a few hours instruction, wood-scraps, and a glob of glue.
Want to know more? Visit Hamp’s website: hampstevens.com. Or email him at [email protected].
