Digging out a fox
This isn't the first time I've done wood carving: I went to an art school in Guyana for 2 years, the Burrowes School of Art.
I just absolutely surprised myself by remembering that.
At the time, there was this incredibly talented student who could take a raw stump and make it crawl with figures. I wish I could remember his name, all I can recall are the discussions we had with one of the instructors, Stanley Greaves, about surface decoration vs sculpture. I remember that I did one relief carving, a small piece of a hand which I unthinkingly ruined with liberal coats of polyurethane. I was young, I didn't have the patience for detail sanding and multiple applications of hand-rubbed waxes.
There's something elementally satisfying about working with wood, which is the same feeling I get from clay: there are no shortcuts and each step is done entirely by hand. Reduction printing is an exercise in sadism I think, for once each color plate in a single print is pulled, the parts of the block from which that color is printed are then carved away. Meaning, after the edition is printed, the block is firewood. This piece below, is me getting my feet wet and finding out what my tools can do before I get into buying supplies. The wood I'm using here is 1/8th of an inch thick and I ought not to be carving into it, but I haven't punched through (yet) to the other side. I won't be printing off this carving: my chisels feel like they could use a whetstone (don't have one yet), and the wood I'm using (poplar?) seems to be a little dry, maybe because it's been planed thin and has been indoors with forced air heating. Once I'm through carving I think I'll try substituting stains for the various colors in the fox.
January 30, 2008
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Bunny: This is the animal she made when I learnt about paper armatures.
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