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.
Wait before you judge. There is a reason for my rating. An early mentor, Ron Campbell, rather abruptly gave me this advice after a particularly wearying session of self-critique, “if you don’t like your work, don’t expect others to like it either.” He suggested I look at each piece, isolate what I liked about it and what needed improving, and work on retaining the good and improving the rest. We don’t forge ahead in every area at once; sometimes, it’s by bits and pieces.
Ron insisted on giving me space in his gallery in Ottowa even though I was completely new to sculpture and a beginning carver. Two of my very early abstract pieces sold that fall, and the sales gave me a bit of a financial boost and some much-needed confidence to keep going.
So it’s essential to like your own work. You can go too far in this. Strutting around like a rampant peacock is OK if you are a peacock, but it is unattractive in an artist. Liking your work is one thing; equating yourself with Dali, Arp, DaVinci, or Rembrandt is something else.
So here is the scoop. Enjoy your work for all its positive features. Then, place yourself in perspective. Whose studio or shop would you be an apprentice or journeyman in?
As I style myself as a ship’s carver, I can see myself as an apprentice in the shops of McIntire, Bellamy, Robb, or one of the Skillins brothers. When I visit the Mystic Seaport or Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum, I find myself standing among the works of those I consider my masters. So yes, I am my favorite, in a way. But I have a perspective on where I stand among those with much to teach me.
Or as Van Gogh said: “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
I try not to get too personal about sports stars or performers. Their performance is what I am interested in; You will not find fan magazines in my house. I’ll recognize that I like what someone does but not link the name to the number or role. When someone says, “What about Paul Whozee? Great, don’t you agree?” Then they’ll have to explain to me, slowly and in simple words, who they are talking about. After which, I am still left wondering why this is important.
It wasn’t always this way. Growing up, I followed baseball, football, and hockey. I also eagerly followed performers I found interesting. But somewhere along the way, a circuit snapped open, and I found other interests. I lost track of who played for the Bruins, which guitarist played in a band I liked, and who that cute actress was. I paid attention to what they did rather than who they were. As I watched other people build insane cults of personality, I realized my lack of interest in individuals wasn’t alarming. Yes, some people loomed so large in my interests that I had to pay attention to them as individuals: Jimmy Buffet or Dr. John.
Mostly, though, I’d think, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that actor before.” Or, ” the Bruins lost, that’s too bad.” If you wanted to discuss personality, it would wind up with me nodding idiotically with a slight smile on my face. If you took me out to a sports bar, you’d want to wear a disguise so that no one knows that you’re with the guy who knows no one and nothing.
Now, woodcarving is different. I can identify the work of several of my favorite 19th-century shipscarvers. Just ask me about Benjamin Rush, Samuel McIntire, or Bellamy. I can tell you a bit about the details of McIntire’s tool kit or how the feathers on Rush’s eagled seemed to nestle together naturally. After we discuss that, I’ll tell you about the mysterious way Bellamy simply stopped carving years before he had to. Hey! I bet you don’t know where he got his wood from.
There’s more, and I don’t have much to do today. Want another cup of coffee? I’ll give you a shop tour and show you the tools, gauges, and templates of the Bellamy eagles I particularly like. You’ll take a raincheck, you say? Sure, just call when you want. Hey? Want to see the library I have on marine carving? No?
Sometimes, it’s just the little things that get you the most excited. It’s like a surprisingly wonderful French Toast at the Gray Jay restaurant in Burlington, Vermont ( OK, a shameless commercial for a place I like!). Or a wonderful morning at a museum.
It was the museum that made the day. Just outside of Burlington is the Shelburne Museum, and visiting there was a decade-long goal. But routes, jobs, and travels just never matched up. Finally, my sons arranged a “guys’ weekend out” for my birthday, and Shelburne was on the agenda. At the top of my agenda was the Ticonderoga, a completely landlocked Lake Champlain steamship restored to impeccable glory. I looked into the staterooms, the officer’s quarters, and an incredibly familiar Fo’casle ( forecastle to you lubbers). The pipe racks ( beds to you flatlanders) were almost identical to those I slept on in the Navy. At the beginning of a deployment, you might wet down the canvas bottom to conform to your body. Under the mattress, you could carefully press a uniform into regulation creases, including underwear. More memories came into play at the next stop as we inspected the boiler. At age ten, my dad, a marine engineer, had me assist in re-tubing the old steam plant that heated our apartment building. It was close enough in design that my dad’s advice on shoveling coal onto an established coal fire returned, and I could almost see the scintilla of hot coals in the old firebox.Â
Woodcarving is one of my things, so we next visited the galleries with the carvings. The Shelburne had many items I was completely unfamiliar with or had only seen in photos. Downloading a photo from the internet is vastly different than seeing the original. As a carver, I’m probably as interested in the details of construction and carving as I am in the total work itself. For that, there is nothing like an actual viewing.
The Shelburne has thousands of interesting pieces in its collection; I’ve only mentioned the few I was most excited by. I admit to being a museum freak, have memberships in several museums, and will hunt out interesting places on my travels. But this was truly someplace special.
The pictures are not the best, but please forgive me; it’s a challenge to photograph something that tall. It’s the trailboards ( really the stem boards), and billet head of the five-masted schooner the Cora F. Cressy. The Cressy was a large collier schooner. A collier schooner was one that carried coal to New England from ports to the south in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and the Tidewater ports of Virginia.
Cora F Cressy stemboards
Very little other than a pathetic pile of rotting timber remains of her, but if you go to the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, you’ll see these impressive stem boards and way, way, way, up high the billet head. The Cressy was not a small ship ( 273 feet ). The large schooners like the Cressy had impressive shear lines with their bows and sterns gracefully reaching above the water. A sailor will always admire a sweet shear. These sweeping lines served a practical purpose. The Cressy, and others like her, were designed and built to carry massive amounts of coal. In the case of Cressy, it’s estimated that she could load 4,000 tons. The sweeping sheer at bow and stern ensured that when fully laden, the ship possessed enough freeboard that she rode safely above the sea’s surface. As a result, the bow embellishment on the Cressy is a very long and elaborate scroll that swept up the stem. Notice that the stem boards were lofted from multiple pieces just as other structural parts, except with the consideration that the carver would be interested in how grain orientation ran for carving.
I came away from the visit impressed with the Cressy. But also a bit mystified. Between 1971 and the end of ’73, I had a live-in carving studio in a little building that had once been an office for a lumberyard on Sherman St. in the Charlestown area of Boston. Adjacent to me at 10 Sherman St. was a towing company called Cressy Transportation. Cressy Transportation was in the business of towing really large broken-down tractors and trailers – not your average AAA tow. I grew friendly with some of the drivers. One day while visiting the office for coffee, I noticed large framed photos of four and five-masted schooners on the wall. Asking about them, they informed me that back when the company had owned a fleet of sailing vessels. The drivers and the clerk had no further information, and eventually, I forgot to follow up on the story behind the photos.
The day I wandered into the Maine Maritime Museum and saw the Cora F Cressy materials on exhibit, I began to put the pieces together.
I confirmed that my recollection that it had been a company named Cressy by hunting through old Boston city directories. In 1969 there they were at 10 Sherman St. I also found the Cressy’s had owned a small fleet of schooners around 1915, but the war years had not been kind to their interests; one was torpedoed in 1917, and another was burned off the coast of France soon after. Fire was a continual hazard for coal schooners due to the flammable nature of the cargo.
The Cora F Cressy, did not have a very long career as a collier. She ultimately wound up as a breakwater, but before that, she found use as a floating nightclub. A bit of trivia that seems to connect the Cressy Family to Cora F. Cressy is that when she became a floating night club, Carl Cressy was given luxury accommodation on her since the vessel was named for his mother.
I have not been able to make a really absolute connection between Cora F Cressy, the Cressy fleet of colliers, or Cressy Transportation. I may never find a link, but I’m stubborn, and I’ll continue to look. It’s part of what makes the interest in maritime history interesting.
Is there a potential ship’s portrait in the offing? I don’t know. Since they consume a lot of time, it’d be a year before my current workload clears up. We’ll see.
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