| At an eight-day carving seminar earlier this month at Vermont Raptor Academy in Vermont, instructor Floyd Scholz encouraged students to think of each carving as a sculpture that tells a story. What does the bird experience? How does it act? What might it feel? Where does it live? How does it interact with it's environment? He stressed the importance of avoiding statue-like birds that simply show what a bird looks like. The large, brightly colored beak on the puffin carved at the seminar tells the story that it is in breeding plumage and that it abandons its life on the ocean to breed on rocky islands. Although it is not obvious in the picture, the puffin is looking upward since this bird, out of its usual habitat, must be watchful for predators that might fly in and snatch a baby puffin. Carvings also have a story about why or how it was created. The story of this puffin is fourteen women who came together to learn new skills and refine old ones. Some were first-time carvers - a recent high school grad who ended up in the emergency room with an allergic reaction to wood dust and an eighty year old who accepted lots of help from Floyd at the beginning then gained confidence to carve herself so it would be her bird even if it looked like it was carved by a first-timer. Some carve only at seminars just for the fun of it. Some were experienced carvers who strive to make each bird our best and were exhilarated by learning techniques to make our carvings more lifelike yet frustrated that there wasn't time enough to incorporate old skills with new. We each dealt with that challenge differently - wolfing down lunch and carving instead of relaxing a bit, staying late to go beyond what was possible in class, or accepting shortcomings. My strategy? A bit of all three plus starting a new puffin carving the day after i returned home so that I'll end up with a puffin that is my best carving ever . . . until my next carving. |
0 Comments
|
ABOUT AUTHORJanice has been a bird carver since 2002. She carves basswood with knives and tupelo with power tools. Her favorite is which ever wood she has in her hands at the moment. Archives
April 2020
|