Hunting in the Woods

Beginning a new peice is like hunting in the woods. It requires a lot of stillness and waiting for the concept to settle in. Lots of watercolor sketches. I explore nuance from drawing to drawing, listening for exactly what each new carving wants to be. Determining and then holding the emotional content of the art frees me to focus on its physical creation. Intention manifests.

The wood is Western Red Cedar. I start with a carcass, a dead tree, and work backwards to create something alive, stripping it of its skin, getting rid of all the non-sculpture fat as quickly as possible. I use some power tools like the Metabo angle grinder I got from Charles H. Day Co. , but I've found that power tools often make my mistakes happen faster. With mallet and chisel in hand, I can stop and think. That's much harder while doing thousands of cycles per minuite. "OOPS, too late...

Better the slower path.

Roughing out the figure, the hunt begins all over again, trying to locate where in the block the art is. So odd to take a round log, square it up and then carve a round figure. But when everything is round, it's impossible to find where the figure might be.

Carving is the hardest thing I know how to do.