Matt Monaco operates full-time woodturning studios within the Ozark region of the USA and offers his works to select local & worldwide clientele of both custom retail & wholesale craft industry and collectors as a full-time professional maker of traditionally turned craft. — Among his generation, Matt Monaco is the only traditional Master Woodturner in America who’s (since youth) trained, apprenticed, and undertaken the initial education, countless hours of workload, and overall professional experience & time spent at the lathe required to pursue, and successfully build a legitimate full-time career as a professional maker within both the wholesale tradeshow & retail makers circuit (as a sole proprietor) as well as within the high-end professional furniture trades, as in-house Production Woodturner for Shackleton Thomas Furniture & Pottery.
At the center of Matt’s work is his understanding in the importance of pursuing fine form, finesse, advanced tool control, sharpening, and cutting execution as a reflection of traditionally crafted design; in producing works made to be as tactile as they are sublime and created with intent & purpose. --Matt is also a Fine Woodworking Contributor & Ambassador who values the vision and applied work-study time necessary to account for encouraging high-quality, traditional woodturning to exist as a refined art, alongside sharing the expression of the craft as calling for any individual's motivation to either gain the confidence, technique, and finesse necessary to develop and form an exciting & rewarding hobby, or to harness a professional level of skill at the lathe for the long term.
Matt also shares his knowledge (openly & willingly) with environments that value the importance of learning the craft in person, and with those who wish to also inspire high-quality continued education to thrive as a value amongst ALL individuals—Withstanding the variable item of concern that the pursuit of Mastery, is NOT the pursuit of elitism, towards faction-based woodworking/craft exclusivity politics —But is rather a philosophical learning principle acting as a commentary on the importance placed on what becoming more effectively expansive & fluid as a maker entails; as such things require an inspired degree of intent, rigor, and training —alongside an authentic desire to gain experience, while practicing such forms of information as learned, in order to develop at the lathe with success.