Merryll Saylan

Merryll Saylan (born 1936) is an American woodturner. She is credited with helping pioneer the popularization of the woodturning field and the application of color in wood art. She is noted as being one of the few women in the craft field, when she first began turning during the 1970s. Early life Merryll Saylan was born in 1936 in the Pelham Parkway area of The Bronx borough of New York City. She moved to and lived in Los Angeles in her youth, where she had an early musical education in piano and viola. She attended UCLA right after graduating high school, where she met her first husband, but would drop out. She ended up attending UCLA once again, after first taking some classes at Santa Monica City College. Woodturning Saylan began woodturning in the mid-1970s. On her earliest works, Saylan recalled, "When I first started I had been making sculpture, but to pay my studio rent, started turning bowls. I also made turned and constructed furniture." In 1982, a house's workshop space in Berkeley, California, caught the attention of Saylan and her partner, Edward Saylan. The two, with the help of fellow artist friends, would remodel the house over the next three decades or so. Saylan came from a background in modern and contemporary design. During her second tenure attending UCLA for her undergraduate studies, she chose design as her major. During her time in college, she tended to her three children after classes. She was one of the first women in the woodturning field; in an interview with the American Association of Woodturners (AAW), she stated, "It was definitely a guy's game in the beginning. I remember reading that in one of the earliest newsletters."