HIgh Summer

 The longest days of summer are upon us and the weight of their importance is magnified by the short appearance and their great beauty. The garden is in full production.  It seems to rain every other day but the intrepid lawn mowers are out on the weekend trying to tame the yard before it turns back into meadow or forest.

The studio is busy too with new work.  Some times trickling but often just a drip, like a leaky valve on the garden hose. Summer seems to be the perfect occasion to throw open that valve and turn on the sprinkler full , to water the gardens of the world with artwork from the heart. 

There seems to be a point in the creative process where a good piece must be put into peril to really grow and flourish into your best work. 

The first example I've chosen is this butternut carving. The piece started from a log chainsawed in half, for bowls, the resulting slab was cut from near the center of the log to remove some checking and get the bowl blanks to a pleasing size. 

After sketching out the image of the birds I rough carved  the outline and began trying to find the rest of the piece in the grain of the wood. Its easy in this stage for me to be seduced by details in the imagery and skip past the fleshing out of the form. Much of the back round material that eventually got cut out was a result of this romance. It was scary at first to put the whole thing back on the bandsaw and really cut back into to it; but like thinning back the seeds when they first pop up and weeding out the garden I hoped that this cutting would help me focus the piece toward the inspiration that got me carving on this slab in the first place. Whether it's "better" or not remains to be decided.

Im hoping to use future blog entries to examine and highlight moments like these within the studio practice. 

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