Iron ore as a carving material? That’s what I’ve been told this is. As a portrait of a Native American, it’s well done, detailed, and has a certain patina of age about it.
Knowing that I was a carver, one of my wife’s grandmothers gave it to me as a present. She and her husband picked it up in the 1950s or 1960s on one of their many rambles through New England, buying antiques. I believe it served as a paperweight for many years.
It is red but with some dark patination. As I mentioned, Grandma said it was carved out of iron ore, which is what I have on it.
I’ve taken it to carving classes to show the wide variety of materials that can be carved.
If you know something about iron ore carving, please leave a note.
The photo captures a piece of art that caught my eye in a restaurant in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Its reductionist style immediately drew my attention, reminding me that schooner sails are all different sorts of triangles, each varying in angles and sizes. It was appropriate that I found this in a seafood restaurant in one of the USA’s premier fishing ports. Historically, the heyday of fishing activity in Gloucester was during the schooners’ days. So, this piece of art is a reminder of the glory days.
Artists and crafters can become lost among the ads and catalogs of new tools. But it’s worthwhile to consider and remember what our most basic tolls can achieve before we rush out and buy the newest thing. For the carver, that toll is the lowly knife.
curved chip design
whirling circle chip designa house sign I carvedoccupied Japan carvingoccupied Japan carvingA cedar fan carved by Ed Menardchip carved practice piecechip carved by my wife’s great grandfatherchip carved stars for presents
Figureheads get lots of attention in maritime museum exhibits. There are even museum collections of figureheads lost at sea. Often, the names of the ships they graced are unknown. If we knew, we could reconstruct a travelogue of all the ports they’d seen.
But many ships lacked figureheads. The old figure went overboard in a storm, or if the owners were Quakers, religious sentiments forbade a figurehead. In its place, a billet head—a bit of fancy carved scrollwork with a small bust or other ornament on top—was used.
While I love figureheads, I’ve never seen the business interest in carving them – much too restricted as a trade. Instead, I’ve carved small billet heads for the sort of small vessel that could sport them these days. Many of the ones I’ve carved hold up signs, grace entryways, or act as bookends. Billet heads are attractive and we can size them for smaller vessels, boats, or home use.
The photo above shows a sample of the billet heads I’ve carved. The green scroll was the first one I did. I simplified my version from a traditional design Jay Hanna carved. The three eagles are of my design but modeled on traditional 19th-century styles. My favorite is closest to the viewer. I carved it in western sugar pine and made the mounting element from mahogany.
The eyes on the eagles are the most essential part of the carving. The feathers look complex but are pretty simple. Get the eyes right, though, and the birdie seems to follow you about the room, casting a gimlet eye on your doings. Better behave. They see everything you are doing – in jest or earnest.
When I lived in Baltimore many years ago, I was a regular visitor at the Walters Gallery. I’d make a beeline to display a case that held miniature carvings done in boxwood. Tiny, precise, and beautiful. I was beginning my journey as a carver, and I took inspiration from those carvings about what was possible for a carver.
Over the years, I’ve considered those carvings an aspirational high point in carving. But my carving is more interpretive than precise. I decided to leave the absolute precision to friends like Bill Bromell, who used watchmaker tools and miniature lathes to shape tiny parts perfectly for model ships.
I made carvings for the bows, sides, and transoms of boats. Excess detail becomes damaged. So I do what any ship’s carver does: I hint but do not offer breakable complexity. There are tricks to this that are rarely mentioned in books. Only two books I know of talk about the trade of being a shipcarver. So, there is a lot to learn. And only a little available to teach it.
Inevitably, you become curious about how other people doing the same work do it. But ship’s carvers are thin on the ground, and none of the folks from the old days are still around. There were no YouTube or TikTok videos available. And they did not write books on how to do it. So you study the carvings, and when possible, you look at the tools.
Your tool kit reflects the carving that you do. Looking at a carver’s tool kit, you can start making reasonable guesses about the work. But tool kits disperse rapidly after a carver dies. Nobody else in the family is a carver. The tools are so much steel to the person clearing up the estate, and no one understands what half the stuff is for. So, the tools go into the estate sale and go to used tool sellers.
In the case of John Haley Bellamy, though, someone must have realized that his tool kit, or a part of it, might be of interest in a museum. There is an open chest of Bellamy’s tools at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. You can see peeking into it that, like many of us, he likes Addis tools and has various regular and deep engagement tools. A steel stamp is inscribed with Bellamy ( used to mark work). The chest is only open partially; only another carver like myself would be so interested that it would be preferable that the chest be completely open. The effect they were going for was more that one of the craftsman had stepped away for lunch and left his tool chest half open.
Books, videos, and even workshops all have a place in working towards mastery. However, few of us serve regular apprenticeships. I’d offer these tips:
Haunt museums and look at the carvings.
Try to work backward to the tools and techniques used.
Seek out mentors who you can tap for knowledge, and don’t expect instant mastery.
Pay little attention to the tool offerings of the big woodworking companies and seek out restorable older tools.
More patterns, sweeps, curves, and styles are available than modern makers can afford to manufacture.
It’s a big puzzle, and you should enjoy solving it.
The little eagle’s head has been carved separate from the body. Why?
Tradition is one reason; I learned from others to carve the head and eye first so “The birdie can watch what you are doing.” But the primary reason is that it’s easier to complete the shape and back of the head when it’s not in place. A look at some of the detailed pictures shows that the head looks as though it’s fully carved, but it’s not. No one will ever see the reverse side, so we just create the impression that it’s there.
The body’s pattern has been cut out, so the next step is to attach the head to the body and begin”fairing” the head and body together. When finished, they’ll look like one. At that point, I’ll begin defining the shapes of the feathers, the feather veining, and the final details. After that, I’ll rough out the banner and add the lettering.
Will it stay natural wood with varnish, get painted, or be gilded with 23-carat gold leaf? Usually, that depends on who commissioned the piece and where it will go.
Years ago, I had a weird dream. Two of my favorite artists, John Haley Bellamy and Salvador Dali, were sitting with me in a coffeehouse discussing art. I merely sat by and listened while the two masters talked. They were deeply involved in a discussion of exaggeration and distortion in art. At one point, they turned to me and asked what I thought. I opened my mouth to speak but woke from the dream that instant.
I spent more than a few hours thinking about that dream and their discussion. Bellamy was famous for his eagles, and Dali was famous for his surrealistic images. The link seemed to be the way images were portrayed by both artists. There were more similarities than you might think when considering how Bellamy accentuated and distorted eagle necks, wingspan and wing proportions for effect.
I began to experiment with the lessons that the masters relayed to me.
There have been no new visits from either Dali or Bellamy yet, but I’ll let you know the next time I meet them at the coffeehouse.
A lot of people make decisions that sound good but actually make them miserable. Yes, you. You’re back in the back row, trying to sink down so I don’t see you! I’m talking to you. You took a degree in business administration even though you were passionate about the arts. You sneak into Continuing Ed classes whenever you can to feed the artist in you. I had people just like you in my carving classes.
The class was a one-week immersive experience in which I took students from tool sharpening to simple cut patterns, chip carving, and on to lettering and the finale of a hand-carved eagle. When you were fatigued, I sent you into a library room filled with art books, carvings, and models to study. More than a few of you were frustrated masters of business administration, accountants, software, and electrical engineers.
You studied in those areas for the fiscal and employment stability they offered. Most of you were men, but there were also women.
At your “real life jobs,” you spent spare time sketching in a doodle here and there of something you’d like to carve, sculpt or paint. You offered flimsy excuses to bosses and co-workers about going to arts and crafts camp. But, you were sneaking off to spend a week in my class, building a boat, or painting watercolors by the shore. You were in stealth mode.
Once in a while, you muse about opening a retirement business, so you collect the tools you’ll need for that venture. In the meantime, you haunt every boat show, art exhibit, or gallery opening you can. The bottom drawer of your desk has the latest art magazines hidden for perusing when nobody is around. But, mostly, you are jealous of everyone who acts on their artistic impulse.
Like a child, you dream of running off and joining the circus.
Daily writing prompt
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.
Every once in a while, you need to shake things up. People fall into habits, wear blinders on their eyes, and lose the broader perspective. This loss of perspective can sneak up on a wood carver easily. You are comfortable carving in one or two species and get flummoxed when you see work in something you are unfamiliar with. Staghorn sumac comes to mind. It’s a lovely and underappreciated wood with a yellowish-green to bronze-brown color when fully dry. In northeastern North America, you’ll see spindly stands of small trees or large shrubs along the roadside. In summer, it has bright red caps of fruit. If you’ve been in scouting, a survival course, or something like that, you’ll recognize the fruits as usable to make a beverage. It’s not exactly something you’d spot as a carving wood.
In 1969, I was in Ottawa, Ontario. While spending time with a First Nations friend, the subject of using Sumac came up. He wanted to show me the work of a friend who almost exclusively carved in Sumac. So we wandered over to Ron Campbell’s studio. Ron didn’t do just a token, one or two pieces in Sumac. He had an extensive collection of figures and torsos carved in it. Not erotic, but maybe the most sensuous carvings I had seen. Graceful curves and a deep, smooth finish made you want to stroke the carvings. The sweeps and curves were made more elegant by the variation in the colors of the wood, a striped bronze that curved and moved with grace.
I took some postcards of Ron’s carvings when I left Canada that fall. I can’t find them right now, but I used them when teaching woodcarving. Whenever a student claimed that you couldn’t use some tree’s wood for carving, I’d pull out the postcards and watch as their eyes took in the undulations and curves. I’d watch when they took the bait and asked me what the wood was. I’d tell them staghorn sumac and watch the disbelief in their eyes. Their eyes disbelieved it was Sumac, but their senses as carvers began to crave the wood that could produce such a sumptuous feast for the eyes.
How the heck did he do that? That may be the first question you ask of Ed Menard, who carves these incredible cedar fans and birds in cedar. A sharp knife and knowledge of how cedar likes to open along the lines of the grain are vital to making it all work. Years ago, while I was running the New England Folklife Center, Ed was our guest at the Lowell Folk Festival. He demonstrated making fans, birds, and other creations. The little bird is bigger than my thumbnail, but not by much. Ed told me that he once carved some much smaller earrings for his mother, but he preferred making them a bit larger.
Ed is known as Birdman and still carves in his small shop in Cabot, Vermont.
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