carving ethics

["Clive Murray-White" <clivemw@zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz>]

Thank you George for:

"My most heartfelt advice for him and any other beginner, is to begin the
learning
process by doing the carving. The more you sculpt, the faster you learn what
you want to do, how you want to do it, and maybe after a very long time,
why."

Before I tackle the flexible shaft issue I feel I should say that we have an
overwhelming bias towards the technical side of things when advising the
beginners when really we should find a way to show that very rapid progress
can be made once a person learns to trust their own hunches, aesthetics, way
of working and personality. It becomes incredibly easy if what you do is
underpinned by some sort of personal mission, heart-felt philosophy and most
productively of all a deep seated set of criticisms about what everybody
else is presenting as sculpture these days, for as soon as you find
something that you really disagree with ( from a personal point of view) you
can then set about making your version of what should be in its place.

Learning to trust your own values is as much part of it all as anything
else. This often involves some form of "letting go", people often find this
bit unbelievably hard and then once they have done it wonder why they found
so difficult.

Flexible shaft - and for that matter all rotating tools have one very major
problem in common, whilst great or even perfect for concave shapes they have
severe limitations when you try to use them to make convex forms, this is
obvious because their circular motion will always leave dents. Now this can
lead to a very clumsy outcome, great concave forms and obviously soggy ill
formed convex ones.

The rotating tools can be quite useful for convex roughing out as long as
you've got a strategy to get rid of unwanted dents, personally I find hand
files by far the quickest and most accurate ( I only use marble so I don't
know what the granite people do).

thanks again George Regards to all

Clive Murray-White
Web: www.cowwarr.com

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