This is the kind of timber that makes you stop scrolling. The maker picks up a thick, rectangular slab of burl and turns it in hand, so both faces and the edge thickness come into view one after the other. Even as raw stock, it reads like a finished showpiece.
The front face is the crowd pleaser. Swirling heartwood in reddish-orange tones sits right up against pale sapwood that carries spalting, and that sapwood is dotted with fine black fungal lines and those round burl eyes. The contrast between the warm centre and the lighter border is what makes the pattern pop, and the live edges leave the outline looking the way the tree grew rather than the way a saw cut it.
The back tells a rougher tale. A large dark void, a bark inclusion, sits recessed into dense burl figuring on that side. In my view that pocket is the most interesting spot on the whole piece, and also the open question here: it is unclear how the maker intends to deal with it, whether to leave it as a natural feature or to stabilise it somehow. The handwritten figures on the wood, 660, 150 and 30-40 in black marker, record the approximate dimensions in millimetres, which suggests the slab is meant for more work down the line.
Overall, a lovely blank with genuine character on every surface, and the spalting plus burl eyes combination is honestly rare to see this clean.