I started carving because computers and smartphones were rewiring my brain, and I needed a way to let it spool out again. Although the ideal would be to just carve with no accompanying blog or second life among the megabytes, I know my limits.
I love objects. Not flat screens, but real three dimensional objects, I mean. Things. Relief carving is fraudulent for this reason, since two dimensions only gives you a representation. Relief carving is the Bernie Madoff of wood carving.
Getting the right objects is the problem. You can collect stuff all you want, and haunt the shops and flea markets, but sometimes you have to just go ahead and make your own. This is true with babies as well. You can steal all the babies you want from the hospital - and sometimes you will actually end up with a baby better than the one you could have made yourself - but you also have to sift through a lot of junk babies. And there’s nothing like seeing yourself in that baby you made, so they say.
But back to more dry discourse that takes all the fun out of woodcarving …. A real thing, as opposed to a representation, can serve a real function. “Dubious function” is ideal, because you can’t take this too far. Not only would it be hard to carve a working vacuum cleaner, but it would be disappointing as well, because all you’d have in the end would be a boring old machine. On the other extreme, if you carved something wholly alive, it would probably just sit on the sofa watching House reruns and not lift a finger at all. Better then to let form follow function follow form, and so on, like the proverbial snake eating its tail. And just for good measure, both the snake and the snake’s tail should be blindfolded and tailfolded and not really sure about the what and the how and the why they are following in the first place.
Bored yet? Sorry. I’ll wrap this up. Blah blah blah when I’m not carving I like: Pretzels, steel guitars, sleeping with the window open when it rains, any cheese classified through the use of the word “cream” preceded by a multiple greater than 2, books with hardboiled dialogue and zero plot, leaf piles, mulch and sawdust as long as it is not in my lungs.
- Ari
