Category: Thoughts on carving

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A Schooner’s Story

The schooner diorama is complete.

But what’s the story behind the diorama? That’s the thing about this type of presentation: there is a story. The schooner depicted here was typical of many built along the Coast of Maine in the eighteen-eighties and nineties,

While researching the carving, you discover the story behind the photo of it departing on a maiden voyage or that wonderful Antonio Jacobson painting. In those images, you never see it going aground off the Isles of Scilly, having a cargo catch fire, or foundering in a mid-Atlantic gale. But that, and “going to the breakers,” was the ultimate fate of many of the vessels.

Most proud owners commissioned and purchased images of their ships sailing on calm seas with all sails set. It’s a dramatic view—the vast billows of sail, the hull cutting through the waves, making its way towards New York or some European port. I’ve carved several similar views. But this one is different. It’s a stark contrast to the typical scenes, a unique portrayal.

The skipper has been caught out, and the crew is scrambling. A good blow is coming on fast. The large stays’ls have been doused as we view the schooner, and the crew is wrestling with the tops’ls. A few crew members have doused the outermost jib ( the flying jib). The mate and skipper are at the wheel discussing further reductions in sail. Later, they’ll rig a sea anchor to steady the ship. Off to leeward, the sky is beginning to threaten, and the seas are running high. 

As a diorama, it’s the sort of scene a sailor might have memorialized years later. It’s something worth recalling long after the ship had been cut down to become a coal barge or gone to the breakers and after you’d swallowed the anchor and taken work ashore.

See more at:https://loucarrerascarver.com/home/a-portrait-carved-in-wood/

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Experiments in woodcarving

Many years ago, I was busy trying to master the art of letter carving. Daily, I carved some lettering and experimented with various styles and variations. I did not want to do idle exercises. So I carved signs for kids’ rooms, mottos, and sayings. I was interested in what I put the lettering on, not just the lettering. Cartouches, ovals, squares, and lots and lots of linenfold banners were carved during this period.

At this time, President Clinton was ” reinventing ” my government job, and I was preparing to reemerge as a maritime wood carver and no longer be an anthropologist. It became my habit to take a small carving project with me to work each day that I could carve during lunch. I’d walk to a neighboring park, find a bench, and carve my lunch hour away.

The projects were not for sale; I pushed boundaries, got fast, and tried out ideas. Not all ideas worked out; sometimes, I pushed the boundaries too far. This little banner is an excellent example of some things to avoid doing.

First notice the italic lettering seems to fall off the curve – be cautious, or avoid italics on curves.

Next, notice how the short and unprotected grain of the curve resulted in weak spots where the wood eventually cracked. You can prevent this by reinforcing the back of the curve. Also, I was using the absolutely cheapest pine for these projects—some of the short grain issues are preventable in harder woods.

Experimentation is a part of gaining mastery, and mistakes are part of how we learn.

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Out of the tool chest

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:

  1. Haunt museums and look at the carvings.
  2. Try to work backward to the tools and techniques used.
  3. Seek out mentors who you can tap for knowledge, and don’t expect instant mastery.
  4. 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.

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A Craft Show

Water was a defining part of most of the shows I did as a marine carver. Of course, I exhibited at boat shows. They were either on the water, or water was a required theme running through them. The shows placed me where my prime customers would be. That all crashed to a halt during the pandemic. I’m not a spring chicken and hauling a full 10X10 canopy, boxes, and boxes of stock and samples hours away got tired. You set up Thursday afternoon and sold Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday. Sunday, late, you packed it all up and drove home.

Aging, even gracefully, takes a toll on your energy levels. While you read this, I’ll be setting up for a fast one-day show. Not all the bells and whistles I’d take for a boat show – but at almost 79, it’s still getting to be a challenge.

I can still carve and create, and I am not ready to hang up the spurs. So, I am thinking of alternatives. Most of my thinking centers around having enough portraits of vessels that I might find a marine gallery interested in carrying my work. They are not models, flat art, or sculpting—but they have aspects of all three.
Yes, I know. The new and different is a challenge to business owners. I know the tradition I am derived from – nineteenth-century marine dioramas. My portraits are just a more recent development of an old tradition.

So, as you read this in the morning, I’ll be selling spoons, spatulas, small bowls, and the like as I cogitate my veritibilies and future as a carver. Online store, gallery representation, or fewer shorter shows. Or something that I have not thought of yet. After all, I may be bright, but there is a lot To learn when you venture into unknown waters.

See you Sunday!

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Mastery

Yesterday, I spent a significant part of the day working on a carving of a large schooner. I based it on research I did for an earlier schooner built by the same yard around the same time in the late 19th century. 

I used skills acquired in the earlier carving to ease the work on the sails’ design. The sails on a vessel like this are most of what you see. So having their contours “look” right, not just be shaped “right,” is critical. After finishing the earlier carving, I spent time analyzing the degree of satisfaction I had with design execution. There were places where my techniques failed to give the correct effect on the jib sails. How I added the masts also looked like a very inadequate paste job – they needed to be proportioned correctly.

So, I figured out a better way to cut in the background around the jibs’ tack . They’ll look crisper in the carving, now. Next I’ll be experimenting with how the masts are tapered and colored ( very lightly). My skill set as a carver grew.

Now for the rant part of this post. Anyone who’s been involved in a quality control process or recognizes the term Kaizen will understand what I am about here. As an artist or crafter, I am not static. I don’t just have a standard job that I repeat infinitely. This is what I have against the concept of being a “Master.” The term carries more than a hint of being a survivor of a race to a pinnacle – a point of stasis. Stasis is precisely what I do not want in my work.

I recollect watching seventh and eighth-dan sensei (seventh and eighth-degree black belts in Japanese swordsmanship) gently pointing out flaws in kata to one another. Even at their degree of mastery, there was room for improvement. That’s the sort of mastery I aspire to – skill sets and concepts of working continually growing.

In art and craft, mastery is a moving target, which is healthy.

Daily writing prompt
What are you good at?
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Making a Mess

I don’t get it. The photos of people’s studios are so neat and clean. Do people work at art and craft there?

Sure, I clean up (eventually), but making something out of wood requires removing shavings, chips, and dust. The essence is removal; all that removal has to go somewhere – the bench and the floor – via the broom out the door. Work and projects pile up.

OK, here it is—mea culpa—what a woodcarver’s workshop looks like while working. No, it’s not a doctored photo.

More than you can take, huh? You can’t sting me with comments about how my mother must be ashamed.

Neat freaks can look away now. I make messes and have fun doing it!

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Satisfaction

Stream of Consciousness Saturday – April 27, 2024

Next weekend, I’ll be showing my work along with other local artists in the Cultural Council’s spring art exhibit. As a result, I am going through boxes of stuff left over from the last actual show I did two years ago. There is a range of goodies – spoons, spatulas, forks, cutting boards, bowls, signs, small boxes, and boat portraits. That’s right! There are some odds and ends, like wooden combs from when I made a small batch of those last year. 

Although I see myself as a maritime carver, I’ve never stopped doing other things. I’m interested in the lives and works of carvers like Bellamy and McIntire, so I’ve read their biographies and found that they, too, dabbled, sampled, and worked in many areas. My conclusion is that putting your creative interests into a harness, bridle, and a set of blinkers is a mistake. People may desire or appreciate one aspect of your work above the others, but that doesn’t mean you have to produce only one thing.

That raises the issue of whom are you pleasing as an artist. The public that purchases? You? or each by turn? 

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Illusion

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.

eagle with banner
detail of one of my eagles
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Wings

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.

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Rule of Thirds

I

The third-floor apartment on Park Avenue had few amenities, including a view of the Kuomingtang sign down the street. I arrived in Baltimore a few weeks after discharge from the Navy and was invited to share quarters with a friend who had a third-floor walk-up in Chinatown.

We had a “sometimes” business carving “genuine” Tiki gods and other countercultural junk. We accomplished this mostly with a Dremel tool and routers. One of us had to find cheap wood for these projects, and scrounging was my specialty.

That was how I wandered into Warburton’s studio – looking for free scrap. I arrived just in time to be recruited. Three balks of wood were being prepared to become a Saint Joseph for a private chapel. I found myself helping move the materials into the shop.

Warburton’s work area had extraordinarily high ceilings. To one side was a mezzanine with a smaller workshop poised above the main work floor. The main work floor contained everything from large bandsaws to a 19th-century jointer that could remove your hand in a second of inattention. Against one wall was the main work area for carving. There stood rack upon rack of carving tools. In a corner was a bench upon which Warburton’s current engraving project sat with the burins and gravers of that trade neatly racked.

I asked Warburton why he used those old-fashioned tools rather than power tools. He looked at me for a while before replying, then said, “You can find out yourself. I need an assistant, and if you can do the work, I’ll teach you why I use those tools.” Actual work on a steady basis was not what I wanted, so I thanked him and said I’d be back to see what he was doing. 

II

I wound up checking back almost every day. Warburton tolerated no lazing about, even by unpaid louts like me. He assigned me all the cleaning tasks he despised and was an apprentice’s lot since the Middle Ages. There was a logic to it. To properly sort walnut plank stock, I had to learn to gauge the quality of the planks and how to properly sticker and stack the boards, so there was air circulation between the levels. Failure to do this could result in warped, twisted, and cupped stock that was worthless to the shop.

Warburton also had a box of old dusty wax fruit, cones, balls, and broken plaster castings that he periodically asked me to set up and draw. I would have gladly sorted several thousand board feet of lumber instead of doing still lives. When asked to do this, my goal was to set up the items in absurd, obscene, or Daliesque tableaus that I hoped would provoke him. He ignored this. Instead, he commented on the balance, composition, rhythm, and pattern formed by the objects. 

His most important lesson was about the rule of thirds. To this day, I am a terrible draftsman, but that summer, I did learn to do perspective drawings of Baltimore street scenes as I grew sick of wax fruit. I always used the rule of thirds and looked at the balance and rhythm in the composition. And I did lots of scut work. I flattened water stones that had been used so often that they had hollowed surfaces, learned the basics of sharpening, and learned to actually use the knife. The maestro maintained that it was the foundational tool and that without being able to sharpen and control it, I’d never be a carver. 

Eventually, I was given a small block of walnut—a scrap, really—and told to create an abstract shape. Emphasis had to be on the grace of curves, smoothness of transitions, and quality of the tool work. I was warned that all compositional elements would be involved. Was it to look like anything specifically? No. But he did pull out several books on the work of Jean Arp and Barbara Hepworth. 

I began to be a snob when called upon to use a Dremel. My routing of Tiki’s became infiltrated with contamination from Hepworth and Arp. My friend accused me of ruining the business. In opposition to this, I began to critique his compositions, pointing out that they lacked balance or rhythm. The fights were loud. 

III

Down the street from our apartment was Oscar’s flower shop. Oscar’s was different. The shop had no real flowers, stems, or leaves. Plastic floral material was just coming onto the market, and Oscar occupied his retirement, making incredible and fanciful arrangements. Oscar was impressed with my new approach to carving. He began to offer me offcuts of cherry and walnut from his farm outside the city. These he posed with his floral creations. We agreed to a 40/60 cut. This probably would not have been an issue with my friend except that Oscar decided that Tiki’s were…so yesterday. He accepted no more Tiki carvings. Riding my first wave of artistic popularity, I asked for a 60/40 percentage cut. I was an established “artiste.” Oscar smiled and said we could revisit the deal when the current inventory sold. I agreed.

About that time, I felt the desire to head to Boston for a week or two. I went on a frolicking detour, and my friend sulked.

About three weeks later, I returned from Boston to find all my carvings on the back loading dock and some new carvings of my friend’s installed in Oscar’s floral emporium. When I asked what had happened, I was informed that my friend had started routing and power sanding pieces similar to what I had hand-carved, but they cost Oscar about fifty percent less. Also, with his big red beard and ripped and stained jeans, my friend looked much more like a real artist than I did with short hair and pressed khakis. 

This did put a strain on the friendship for a while. But my buddy’s actual love in art was painting, and he soon returned to that. Oscar also moved on. In a few weeks, he called us to come to get everything left in the shop. Oscar had found a source for driftwood on the Delmarva that he maintained looked much better than anything we had done, and they were much cheaper. 

This was a different rule of thirds for art: you innovate and sell. Someone copies and sells for substantially less. Lastly, the demand for the product declines.

IV

Later that week, my friend and I stopped at Warburton’s to look at the progress on Saint Joseph. I mentioned to Warburton how we both lost a source of income from the sculptures. Warburton simply said, ” It’s hard to improve on nature.” To which we replied, “Yeah. Or to depend on the taste of a guy who sells plastic flowers.”

Rule of Thirds was first published on April 19, 2020 and is a Flashback Friday presentation.