When I started seriously working as a marine woodcarver, I had a silly idea that I’d be concentrating on transom banners, billet heads, and quarterboards. It took a woman at a New Hampshire show who wanted me to carve a portrait of her husband’s boat to show me that it was going to be much more.
I also began selling my wooden spoons at shows for supplemental income. They were pretty much plain, straight shaft spoons. A customer walked up and persuaded me to make spoons with curved handles. Not only curved, but reciprocally curved. Those spoons, she said, offered the cook multiple options for gripping and holding the spoon.
Advice like that I received from my customers is like receiving a golden fleece. But without all the effort of adventure, marketing research, mishaps, or trouble. Both tips led to success in sales and satisfying artistic endeavors.
OK. The spoons in the photo are lying on my workbench this afternoon. The straight with the straight shaft one is almost done. But the curved one has a way to go before the curvatures are “fair” in the maritime parlance, and comfortable to the hand. The bowls need to be sanded and polished afterwards. Then they’ll be treated with the mix of beeswax and mineral oil I use to seal them. Afterward, they’ll fit in someone’s stocking for a Christmas present!
The gilt-edged age for the ship carver had to have been the 17th and 18th centuries. The figureheads were the least of it. There were gilded coats of arms, allegorical figures, swags, and elaborately carved moldings everywhere. Set sail, wind up in a storm, get into a dust-up with the Dread Pirate Roberts or meet up with a French corsair, and when you came back into port, watch the carvers bill rachet skyward. Those cherubs on the starboard Quarter gallery? Somebody’s cannon blew away? They need replacing.
I doubt that carvers grew wealthy. But, there was steady work. Think of it as a handy 17th and 18th-century body shop for ships. “Here’s the estimate- we can try to save that Neptunas Rex on the transom, but it’s cheaper to replace.” Sometime in the Napoleonic Wars, the British Admiralty began to budget the purse into which captains could dip for replacement swag. Just so much for a frigate, this for a fifth-rate, that for a third and so on. I’ve suspected that the Admiralty knew that some skippers and bosuns were in on a deal with with the carvers – ” I’ve got some cherubs this week buy them from me rather than Smithwick, and I’ll kickback 5%.” The fine art of naval chicanery in practice. Thus began the inexorable decline and fall of the honorable trade of ships carver.
Things Change
Over on this side of the Atlantic, there were no royal purses to fund tons of gilded frippery. During the glory days of American sail, journalists would visit the docks and write a commentary on which newly arrived vessels were most tastefully attired. Many Maritime Museums display the fine figureheads that once graced the bows of the clippers.
Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum
Then along came the Quakers. They caused crews to mutiny by taking figureheads off vessels and replacing them with sober billet heads. Sail without our Jeremey Bentham figurehead? Never. Figureheads continued to have their day for a while. But, gradually, more modest accouterments became the rule. The cost was part of the reason; fancy carvings were expensive to maintain. The following photos are from the U.S.S. Constitution Museum (for a detailed article on the Constitutions bow candy dip into this Article: https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2017/03/03/bow-decor/)
USS Constitution
The first photo came off the Constitution, and the second came from H.M.S. Cyane. Both are good representations of early 19th naval billet heads, spare and none too fancy. But, great representations of the carver’s art.
Two -headed equestrian figurehead from a Royal Navy vessel ( Peabody Essex Museum)
The Final Era
Compared to the two-headed equestrian figurehead ( circa 1750, in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum), the billet heads appear downright dowdy. The final billet heads are from the Penobscot Bay Maritime Museums collection. They have the distinction of being in mint condition Carved by either Thomas or W.L. Seavy of Bangor, Maine. They never were mounted on a ship and represent the end of billet heads for commercial shipping.
Here is a shot of more recent work on a contemporary sailboat.
Lastly, here is a ridiculous bit of plastic on an otherwise pretty boat.
These days a Ships Carver may get a commission for a small billet head like the ones I carved. As shown in this photo:
But the bulk of the work is in quarterboards, transom banners and number boards. After I stopped doing boat shows I covered the walls of the porch with the samples I’d display. It gives a fair ide of the variety of wwork people would request.
I once decided to carve ten eagles from variations on the same basic pattern. The 18th and 19th-century carvers had done it with eagles and figureheads. Small and large variations kept things distinct and interesting. An old favorite pattern would become dated, and the design would get reworked.
I could picture the scene in the shipyard’s office as a few of the locals gathered around the woodstove on a frosty fall day for companionship. The discussion was on the crass and revealing new fashions being requested for the figurehead design on the Tilly P, Arkham. Imagine that revealing bodice! What happened next is supposition, based on what I’ve seen in boat yards. Pencils and a piece of scrap wood came out, and rough sketches were drawn. Then there is a discussion of practical matters: how much to charge.
I decided to follow the lead of my predecessors and experiment.
The Eagles
I began with a photo of my favorite eagle at Mystic Seaport. The transom eagle from the first U.S.S Pennsylvania. I enlarged it to a size that I could use as a pattern, and from there, set about a two-year-long excursion into variations on themes.
In my first iteration, I found myself channeling a bit of McIntire as I played with the head. However, I checked myself short of going the McIntire serpentine neck route. I carved this one in a lovely piece of sugar pine, and the closeness of the grain allowed me excellent control of the tools. The movement in the legs of this eagle permitted me to create a sense of depth and movement in a piece of wood that was not that thick.
In the middle of the cycle of ten eagles, I channeled a very tiny bit of Bellamy with the head, neck, shelving of the upper wing, and banner. Anyone knowing Bellamy’s work, though, will recognize that he was an influence on my approach without any attempt to copy his style. It was just fun to acknowledge the master without imitating him. Made out of white pine, I gilded the piece, which I usually do only at the client’s request.
Eagle based on the transom eagle for the first USS Pennsylvania
The final eagle was a bit more architectural in approach. The head looks downward, and the body seems to be marching forward under a canopy of threatening wings. The wings were hollowed, giving the eagle an aggressive look. I had a piece of wood that could take bold carving, carved from thick local Massachusetts pine. Preparatory to gilding, I thinly painted with bronze paint. I liked the semi-transparent effect so well that I’ve left it that way.
Parting Thoughts
Boat shops are full of patterns with notes and measurements on how to alter the boat to the desired length, breadth, or other features. Mine is the same, and what I’ve seen from the remains of old-time ship carvers’ shops. The old-timers did the same.
The great martial artist Miyamoto Musashi said that from one thing, we could learn a thousand things.
Mix things up. Learn something new from something old.
You’ve all heard the saying that you should keep it simple, stupid? Well, simple is hard to do. There is an urge to complicate. To add details and complexity. “oooh! Look, you can see the little man inside the truck, and he has his hand on the shift! and it’s only half an inch long!” While I don’t want to suggest that complex isn’t hard, I do believe that sometimes simplicity leaves the imagination open to add to the story. Without the complexity.
For me, that means carving a full ship in twelve to fourteen inches and suggesting complexity, but leaving out many smaller details. Just make suggestions. A friend of mine who was a model maker suggested that excess detail can distract from errors in larger things – perhaps the shape of sails.
Life is like art in that regard, too. We admire simplicity, praise it, and sing of it. But overcomplicate our lives.
Of course, he who has the shop stuffed to the gills with tools is no one to talk. But hey…let him who is perfect toss the first wood shaving!
Friday is now a day off, and I’m having some issues adjusting to three-day weekends. I know, some would love to have that problem. But today, I used about half of that time productively in the shop. I am beginning to adapt!
I had batched out a bunch of blanks for cherry spoons, forks, and spatulas over the past week. Today, I began turning the rough blanks into nearly complete items. Then I ran into a problem.
Defects and corrections to them
When you select the wood, you can eliminate some of the pieces right away by a visual examination. Cracks, rot, or visual defects that look like they may prove structural are reasons to reject the piece. Throw it into the firewood pile. Some defects are more challenging to detect and may not become apparent until much later. That’s what happened today. Two of the spoons had some funky cross-grain in the bowl that proved hard to smooth down.
Most of the time, the issues appear in the bowl of the spoon. Carving the hollow of the spoon, you are crossing the grain structure at an angle. Rough patches can occur. Most of the time, these patches can be smoothed by careful sanding or scraping. But they must be addressed. You can’t leave the tiny crevices, pits or abrasions for food materials to collect in. It’s not a foodsafe practice.
You can’t fill or seal these defects. Anything you fill them with might fall out and contaminate someone’s food. So, you either resolve the issue and remove the defect, or you dispose of the spoon as unsalable. Considering the time and materials involved, it’s very desirable to sort things out before the finishing process goes too far.
Tempering and finishing
Tomorrow I’ll temper the batch and make my final decision after tempering. Tempering is a process you do before final finishing. You boil the semi-finished pieces for a few minutes. After the pieces have cooled and dried, you can proceed to the final sanding. Most of the pieces in today’s lot are fine. I’ll be watching those troublesome pieces, though, and promote them to duty in the wood stove if the defects can’t be corrected.
Tempering woodenware
After final sanding, I apply a coat of USP mineral oil. It soaks into the wood, and gives it a finished look. I sometimes leave a batch sitting in oil for several days so they absorb the oil. The oil seals the wood, but is food- safe.
Why not use a varnish or shellac? I only use finishing materials on woodenware like this that are known as food-safe, which includes mineral oil. The oil seals the wood and prevents it from absorbing odors or flavors from the items you cook. Periodically, you should renew the mineral oil coating. Only a few drops are needed.
Why not use your favorite oil? Many oils will go rancid or impart their own taste to the food you cook. Mineral oil has no odor or flavor. If you must use something other than mineral oil, I’d suggest a very pure almond oil. It has little odor and flavor.
After the oil has absorbed, wipe off all the excess, and your woodenware is ready for sale or use.
Woods for woodenware
Want to try it yourself? Many tool retailers can sell you basic kits for spoon making. I personally prefer Lee Valley as an honest purveyor of high-quality tools, but there are many others.
Select your wood species with care. I primarily use cherry, but I also work with birch and maple. They are woods I source locally, have good working characteristics, and have no strong odors or tastes. I am wary of tropical woods because I don’t know how safe they are in contact with food.
You now know ninety percent more than most people who use woodenware for cooking. Don’t be snooty while educating the innocent. And enjoy your handmade woodenware.
small eagle based on a design used on a paddlewheel steamboata Boston Pilot schooner on a sea chestPattern’s hanging in my shop
All carvings today. The only one that is not mine is the sign. The rest are mine. the shop photo I took one day of some of the patterns that hung in my shop. Like a lot of people who do maritime work, patterns accumulate – you might alter the size or some feature of it for a specific job. But having the pattern beats redoing a popular piece a dozen times.
I went to the greenhouse shop this week to clean and set up for the next ship portraits I’ll be carving. I cut the wood blanks in the fall, and the preliminary artwork was done in December. Usually, I clean and then begin work in February, but this has not been a typical year. Too cold and too icy.
While cleaning, I sort through tools I don’t expect to use. It’s mostly items for making chests and large boxes that fall into that category. For the time being, I’ll move them into the basement shop I rarely use. I need the room in the greenhouse for planned projects. Tool needs fluctuate with demand. While I do not think I’ll make another searchest or small chest, I’ve learned never is not a safe word.
While never is not a safe word, I feel safe in saying no more tool buying sprees are in the offing. Last year I made two very select purchases of used carving tools. Those rounded out the selection needed for my portrait carving. These were mostly small tools of odd profiles that are not manufactured anymore. I am probably their third owner.
But I still peruse my favorite catalog and website: Lee Valley Tools. For a woodworker, it qualifies as a sort of tool porn. “!!!Looka this one – Jeezz! I just hafta get that!”
These days, I try to be more restrained. When I go to their site, I hide the charge card. I force myself to have cooling-off time after I get excited and before I hit add to my cart. Then I hum a few bars of Amazing Grace or some such tune to distract myself. I go and have a cup of tea.
Who am I fooling? I need that new detail sander! The small tool sharpener! The tiny plane for groundwork and their work support kit is on sale. I’ll find some way to fit it into the budget.
a bunch of hand carved sloops and a schoonerA hand carved letter openerBaby Jesus from Louis Charpentier’s Nativity sceneBoarding plank carving on the USS Constitution.Fantasy shipWooden flowers
All carvings this time around, but not only mine:
1.) The first one is mine. Periodically, I’ll carve a bunch of small pieces like this for small signs, box decorations, or fridge magnets. They are good practice and fun to carve.
2.) I paid a dollar or two for this at a yard sale. I’s excellently carved, almost certainly European and in European walnut. Someone was practicing carving the acanthus leaf.
3.) My friend, Louis Charpentier could carve anything out of anything. Every year he had a gigantic Nativity scene in his front yard. It was all carved from white styrofoam, glued together and painted.
4.) One of a pair of Boarding Planks that line the gangway of the USS Constitution, carver unknown. I’ve carved the design frequently for other purposes.
5.)This little fantasy ship is one of my favorites. I carved it many years ago from a drop-dead gorgeous piece of Allegany cherry.
6.) I carved these flower pins for my wife early in our marriage. I was fooling around with some maple scraps, and there they were.
It’s true. Sometimes, less is more, or less allows you to develop more in new directions. My shop output has dropped dramatically from a year ago. Most of the decrease is in small items like treen ( wooden kitchenware). Why? I decided to stop doing craft shows. And I discovered that it improved my life and work.
What’s up with this? Well, I used to do boat shows. In the three days of a boat show, I’d sell hundreds of dollars worth of spoons and such. I sold enough to cover my travel, food, and expenses. If the family was along, it fed four ravenous kids, too. Normally, in the weeks and months after the show, orders would come in for more expensive items like quarterboards, transom banners, eagles, and boat portraits. Each show was a profitable labor that yielded long-term results after the show dates.
My merry-go-round of boat shows ceased with Covid, and I began to age out of strenuous three-day shows, which were actually four-and-a-half-day commitments with travel, set up, and breakdown.
The craft shows yielded almost no after-show income. I am not really a spoon maker but a person who sells them at my booth to generate other sales like the ones I mentioned earlier. so after a few shows earlier this year I decided that it was too expensive in time and effort to do the shows. So, I decided to leave them to the mass-produced junk crafts, cosmetics, and beadwork. As a result, my shop volume decreased.
To an extent, time is a vessel into which you pour your creative energy. And the increased time available made it possible for me to advance creatively. This has been one of the areas in which I have advanced positively this year. I’ve stumbled upon new ways to do boat portraits, and the smaller production of treen has allowed me to spend more time perfecting my techniques.
The other day, I was in an antiques shop in Newburyport. I got into a discussion with the owner about 19th-century ship portraits by seamen. I showed her a photo of my portrait of the schooner Ada Bailey, and the debate turned animated over how water can be modeled to look dramatic. She appreciated the techniques I had come up with to add depth and action to the waves in a limited depth of field.
In the shop, I’ve been working on the last batch of small items of the year—treen. Having the leisure to stop and think rather than work furiously to prepare for a show, I devised a few new ideas and tried some new techniques. The photo below shows the batch fresh from being tempered. Tempering involves putting the treen into boiling water to raise the grain before final sanding. Tomorrow, I’ll finish the sanding and apply USP Mineral oil as a finish.
The shop’s cold reminds me of why I shut the shop up at this time of year. January is spent studying, drawing, and developing ideas I’ll start working on in March. I already have some preliminary designs selected for portraits, wood laid by, and aspirations.
You can find out what grit of sandpaper you need to use on the internet. But learning what that thin whisker of a wire edge really feels like on a just sharpened gouge or chisel may be more challenging. And while Youtube videos can walk you through many processes learning how to glide a gouge with the right amount of force through teak might not be one of them. So for these and many, more in-person instruction is still the best answer.
There are many places where you can get intensive training in craft skills that are hard to master on your own. My own experiences as an instructor have been at WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine. At places like WoodenBoat, the courses are a week or longer. During that time, you will get immersed in the craft in which you are interested. For most, it will be the closest thing to a craft internship or apprenticeship that can be achieved.
Schools like WoodenBoat offer great value for what you pay, quicken your skills and accelerate your mastery of skills that are very hard to learn from books and videos.
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