Advanced Carving: Venice Room (Part 6) Workshops 62-73

The golden ratio in wood carving is a proportion of roughly 62 to 38 that sets where the middle line of a leaf falls, and how big one division runs against its partner opposite. No ruler comes near it. I look at a span, split it into ten in my head, and set the mark about six tenths of the way over. Whole method, right there. Explaining it takes longer than doing it.

Have you ever finished an ornament where every element came out clean, and the board as a whole still looked dead? Did both halves come out the same size? That feels safe. Safe and right are two different things, and workshops 62 through 73 are the stretch where I stop talking about tools and start talking about proportion instead.

I repeat this three or four times across the twelve workshops. I will say it once more here, since this one idea moves a carving from correct to alive. Matched does not mean equal. Acanthus was never equal, and the old Venetian work is full of pairs that agree in idea and disagree in size, which your eye reads as growth rather than as geometry.

What decides whether an ornament looks alive or only correct

• Split any span into ten by eye and set the line about six parts along.
• The true number is 0.618, so 62 out of 100. I said 0.68 on camera in workshop 72 and had to correct myself.
• Matching pairs get different sizes on purpose. Two centimeters on one side wants three on the other.
• A long leaf takes several divisions, and every one of those gets subdivided again.
• A gouge leaves one clean wall and one rough wall, so the same hollow is worked from both ends.
• Clean the surface flat before any detail, because you cannot draw on a mess.

Where does the golden ratio come into carving?

Take two points on the leaf, the start of a movement and the place it dies out. Run an invisible line between them. Now divide that line into ten, five and five, and shift your mark six parts toward whichever end the leaf already leans. Your middle line goes there.

The true figure is 0.618 and change, and the golden ratio has been written about for two thousand years without much help to anyone holding a gouge. In workshop 72 I said 0.68 out loud and caught it a few seconds later. Then I wrote 62 against 100 on the wood in blue marker, because you can hold that in your head while your other hand holds a mallet. Close enough. No eye on earth catches the difference between that and six tenths.

Every later division hangs off that first line, which is why so much rides on it. Put the spine of a leaf down the exact center and the whole thing reads like a diagram. Shift it, and the leaf looks like it grew.

Why not just measure it?

I am not after perfection. Nobody is going to lay a ruler on the finished panel and ask whether I landed on 0.618 or on 0.6, and if somebody did, I would tell them they are looking at the wrong thing. I eyeball it. I count the ten parts in my head, and I do not count them carefully.

A practical reason as well. Nothing in relief stays flat. Every lobe tilts and wraps and slides under its neighbor, so the distance a rule reports is not the distance an eye reads from four feet back. Your eye measures the projection. A rule measures the wood.

The same reasoning sits underneath the rule of thirds a photographer uses, and it is the reason I ask students to draw before they carve. If you want the drawing side of it properly, the design course covers it with a pencil and no wood at all.

Dynamic symmetry, and why one side runs bigger

Static symmetry is equal and equal. Same opening left, same opening right, same eye both sides. Most people build that when they are being careful, and a panel built that way looks like it came off a machine.

The other kind keeps the idea and changes the size. If the separation on this side is two centimeters wide, the one facing it wants to be three. If a detail here is small, its partner over there gets made bigger. Five to eight. Two to three. The pair still reads as a pair, and it stops reading as a stamp.

Look at yourself for a second. Your two eyes are a matched pair, so are your ears and your hands, and not one of those pairs is identical. One is always slightly bigger. Your brain has been calibrated on that since the day you were born, which is why a leaf sized off the Fibonacci sequence feels right to a stranger who could not tell you why.

The idea has a name and a history. Jay Hambidge put the phrase dynamic symmetry into circulation in the 1920s and argued the Greeks had been working that way all along, which not everybody accepted then and not everybody accepts now. I am not going to fight about the scholarship. I only know what happens on the board when I use it.

Where do the divisions fall on a long leaf?

A short leaf takes one division. A long one takes several, and I mean that literally, because a single division stretched over four inches of leaf just looks lazy. I mark the main ones first, then go back over every one of them and subdivide.

Subdivide everywhere. That instruction is the whole of workshop 69. Each division I put in gets smaller divisions inside it, and some of those get smaller ones again, and the eye never really resolves the bottom of it, which is exactly the point.

Same six out of ten every time, at every scale. A main division sits six tenths down the leaf, and the small one inside it sits six tenths down that, and the one inside that does the same again. After a few hundred hours your hand stops consulting you about it.

The Roman leaf and the Greek leaf divide on different rules, and the Byzantine one differently again. The proportion underneath them does not change.

What is the eye of an acanthus leaf?

An eye is the deep hollow where two lobes turn apart. No other single element does as much work, since your eye finds it first from across a room.

I excavate it much deeper than looks reasonable while you are standing over the bench. A spoon gouge reaches in where a straight tool will not sit, and for the deepest of them I take a number 9 in 10 mm and a mallet.

The pipe, and why the hollow comes first

A pipe is my word for the raised tube of wood running along a lobe, convex all the way, catching light down its length. That ridge is what makes a leaf look inflated instead of flat.

Here is the part people get wrong. You cannot raise a pipe. Wood only goes one direction, so what you actually do is hollow out beside it, and the pipe stands up because everything around it went down. No concave first means no pipe later.

The shadow underneath is the other half of the job, and that was the whole subject of workshops 50 through 61. Depth is what a pipe casts, and casting is what makes it visible.

Why work one hollow from two directions?

Every time I run a gouge or a veiner through wood, one wall of the hollow comes out clean and the other comes out torn. Not the tool. It is grain doing what grain does, and in a mild wood like basswood it stays quiet enough to tempt you into ignoring it.

In from one end, stop halfway, walk the tool round to the other end, come back and meet myself. Both walls get carved downhill. Wherever I feel the fibers lifting instead of parting, I change position rather than push harder.

Why clean the surface before any detail goes in?

I call the cleaned surface a canvas. Number three across the high spots, barely any pressure, just knocking the ridges off so the shape underneath becomes visible. I need a canvas before I can draw on it.

Every canvas has a shape, and the shape is the front of a fishing boat. Narrow where it starts, swelling out, then turning under. Once you see the bow in it you stop guessing where the surface is going.

I could do more with these surfaces than I do. Wild twists, deeper reversals, movements that would photograph beautifully. I hold back because the panel has to be true to the Venetian period, and a Baroque gesture in the middle of Venetian ornament is just a mistake wearing a nice coat.

Which tool does which part of this work?

Nothing here is exotic. Most of these twelve workshops run on four or five tools, and the sizes matter more than the makers.

Tool	Size	What it does for me	Where it goes on the leaf
Number 11 veiner	1.5 mm to 7 mm	Opens a division and frees the waste beside it	Everywhere
Number 11, large	20 mm	Removes bulk in a hurry	Around the head of a canvas, usually with a mallet behind it
Number 9 spoon	10 mm	Reaches down into a hollow that a straight shank cannot enter at any angle	Right down inside the eye
Number 3	Medium	Skims high spots	The whole surface, before a single detail goes in
Back bend	Number 5	Takes facets off a convex and rounds a pipe over	Along the side of every pipe
Skew chisel	25 mm	Slices a ridge away instead of pushing it	Transitions
Micro tool	Smallest on the rack	Thin steel passes through the fibers rather than shoving them aside	Last subdivisions

The micro tools I use most are the Peter Benson collection from Ashley Iles, and I like them for one dull reason. The steel is thin. Thin steel goes through fibers instead of shoving them aside. You do not need a micro tool for this work, though, and a full size gouge will get you there.

Worth naming as well is the Gonzalez chisel, which has every skew angle built into one handle, 45 degrees and 22 degrees and the rest. I love those things. When a straight edge will not sit down on a slope, that is what comes off the rack.

Does a number 2 mean the same thing in England and in Europe?

It does not, and this trips people up constantly when they buy their first chisel from overseas. A skew chisel is number two in England and number one in Europe. Same tool, same edge, different stamp.

My big skew is marked number two because it is Ashley Iles, which is English marking, London pattern marking to be exact. Meanwhile a gouge on my bench, stamped number eight, feels like a seven every time I pick it up, and that brand happens to be my favorite at the moment. The stamp is a guide. Your hand is the authority.

None of that matters if the edge is dull, which is a whole other subject and one I gave its own course. Sharpening is the hardest of the three skills and it takes years.

Why did Riemenschneider carve the side nobody would see?

People always ask about him when I skip finishing an area that flowers will cover. Tilman Riemenschneider worked the backs of his figures to the same standard as the fronts, and what he would say about it was that people will not be able to see it, but God will.

That is true. I believe it. And we live in a different century, and I do not have the luxury those men had. In the 15th century a carver moved to the location of the project and could stay there for years, and he was paid well for it. Riemenschneider was paid well, as far as anybody knows, and nobody can ask him now. People now expect the work finished quickly.

So I have to be wise about where the hours go. I can spend too much time in an area that will end up under a flower, and that time is stolen from somewhere the eye actually lands. Hopefully you like the result. More to the point, my client likes it, and the client is the one who ordered it and pays for it.

There is a version of this work where none of that applies. Big carving for churches, huge pieces, where plenty of carvers relieve the shape and stop there without ever taking a final pass. That is legitimate. At that size the extra hours would be invisible anyway, and knowing which job you are on is half of being a professional.

Who is this room actually for?

This is the sixth stretch of one panel. It began back in workshops 1 through 12, ran through 13 to 25 and 26 to 37, and by 38 to 49 the board already had shape. Nobody carves this in a weekend. It is months.

If money is the biggest problem in your life right now, then a pencil and a sheet of paper cost nothing, and I would honestly send you to draw first. You have to be real about that. But if you can already rough out a leaf and you want to know why yours looks stiff next to a 15th century one, the answer is on this page and the practice is in the twelve workshops.

Do you want to understand why the old work looks the way it does, instead of copying the shape and hoping? Would a leaf that grows off its board interest you more than one more finished ornament? Then the whole school is one door, and this room is one course behind it. Shall we carve?

Want to look around first, that is fine. The map of every lesson is open to anybody, the story of the school sits on one page, and the classes in Maine are there if you would rather stand at a bench next to mine. Start here if you have never held a gouge, and a shorter course on acanthus over moldings waits if a whole room is too much to take on.

The board is covered in pencil by this stage, and not just gray pencil. Red lines, green lines, blue marker over the top of both. I know it looks like a children's book somebody colored in, colors all over. I live with that.

One last thing, and it is nothing to do with proportion. In workshop 64 I sharpened a pencil partway through and got graphite all over my hands, said out loud that this was no bueno, and kept carving anyway.