Wood
can take many forms, from a tree to a house, from a piece of furniture to a door, from something functional, to something sculptural. This section of the gallery is devoted to the pure sculptural works I've done in wood. Some are very early pieces, dating back as far as 1973, and the photos I had of them were not studio quality. Most of them were given away so please try to look at the piece more than the picture of the piece. They do show the beginnings of my eventual venture into the world of sculptural art, which includes bronze and stone.
The Schnitzlerschule in Brienz was organized into three sections, ornamental, sculpture, and violin making, each section having eight students. I gravitated towards the ornamental side of woodcarving to begin with, and out of that came the doors, and furniture carving. One area of that arena included relief carving, and that led me into a few things that were not functional at all, but just pure art. I'd been whittling other pieces from time to time, as a hobby, not having any idea at the time that it would lead to where it did.
Wood has a feel when carving it that lets the carver know what it wants to be, and I've let myself flow with that at times. This is the beginnings of my quest into freeform and non-representational art. Wood is a warm and alive material to work with, and when working with it, the shapes are often reflective of the particular piece of wood, flowing with the grain and around the knots. I found it to be a wonderful medium to work in, but some find it too time consuming. It does take a lot of time to carve most anything since there are no remedies for mistakes, so every gouge-cut has to be right. It takes time to learn the control necessary to do this, and a lot of actual hands-on experience to learn how the wood will work, since each type of wood, and every individual piece, for that matter, works a little differently. Woodcarving is a labor of love, and for those that do it, they do it because they love the medium and the process more than the product.
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