Advanced Carving: Venice Room (Part 2) Workshops 13-25

An acanthus head in the Venetian manner is a high relief leaf built on a thick glued-up lime blank, divided into three main separations, and hollowed out underneath so a person standing below reads the whole shape. Its tips come out round rather than pointed, because those same shops also carved marble, and marble gets sanded.

Do you want your leaf to look right from where people will really be standing? Would you like to know why the old Venetian leaves are round at the tips instead of sharp? Does it bother you when a carving falls apart the moment the light moves? Workshops 13 through 25 are thirteen sessions of that reasoning, said out loud, while the panel is still clamped on my bench.

This is the second block of a very long commission. A whole room in lime wood, going up high, in a room where I already know which side the light comes in. So my lamp sits on that same side and it stays there. Every concave in these thirteen workshops was shaped for that lamp.

What decides every move on this panel

• The panel gets seen from below. That one fact drives the design, and I say so more times than you will want to hear.
• My lamp copies the real window, so the concaves throw their shadow the direction the finished room will.
• Round leaf tips, never sharp ones.
• An acanthus begins as a boat shape, then takes three main separations, sometimes five.
• A relief cut goes into every triangle before anything shaping comes near it. I learned that lesson too many times.
• The blank is glued up thick, and that thickness is the only reason the deep undercutting works at all.

Why are Venetian acanthus tips round instead of sharp?

Venice sat on top of a stone trade, and the whole reason sits there. Italy had marble and Italy had a great many stone carvers. Marble must be sanded smooth or it looks bad, so those shops sanded everything. And it was pretty much the same school doing the stone and the wood, because it is almost the same trade. Almost. Pretty close. The same people very often did both.

So the hand that smoothed a marble capital smoothed a lime leaf the same way, and the sharp points went out of the vocabulary. There are certainly designs of acanthus with sharp points, and plenty of periods used them. Round tips are just what those particular people did, and being authentic to them is the entire brief on this room.

Germany went the other way at the same time. Tilman Riemenschneider was alive and working, and Germany had plenty of skilled wood carvers and almost no skilled stone carvers. They carved a great deal for the churches before the Reformation, before Martin Luther, and they used lime wood, exactly the wood sitting on my bench right now. But smoothing a surface was not in that culture. Go and look at original German carving of the 1400s and the tool marks are all still standing there. In Italy everything is smooth. Even now, if you know Italian furniture, it is smoother than the rest of Europe. I think it is in the blood.

England gives you the other half of the proof. Grinling Gibbons is a famous wood carver, and he also tried stone. His stone carving looks terrible, in my opinion. It really does. But he tried, and I like him for trying. If you want his wood work instead, that is a whole different class in Maine.

What changes when a carving is only ever seen from below?

Almost every decision changes. I would develop this head completely differently if nobody were ever going to stand under it. Look straight down at these flips and they read wrong. Stand below them and they are the best thing on the panel.

Which is why I keep stopping the tool and looking up at the piece from the floor side. My camera cannot follow me there, which is the one thing I apologise for most in these thirteen workshops. Every so often I move the lamp, because at night the light in that room will come down from the ceiling instead, and a concave that looked right at noon goes flat.

Depth turns into a friend here. The deeper I go under a leaf, the less of the inside anybody can ever see, so the deeper work is more forgiving. There are five different kinds of shadow, and a carver working near a ceiling spends a lot of time picking which one he wants. I go as deep as the material lets me, then check the back so I do not come through. I have gone through before. Flowers, mostly. I have a tendency.

How many separations make an acanthus leaf?

Every acanthus starts as one shape and then gets divided. Think of a boat, or a leaf, or what I sometimes call a fishing boat. Call that the overall form. Then come the main separations, at least the three big ones, and lots of times five. Nothing after that matters until those are right, because the curliness people admire in Venetian work is only the subdivisions hanging off a correct main movement.

Before any of it, the outline gets chopped in with a number nine, 6 mm or a quarter inch. Setting in, is what wood carvers call that. Set in the idea, then leave the thing completely alone until the drawing is fixed.

Then a relief cut, straight down, in every triangle. A 3 mm nine, one eighth of an inch, is what I reach for, and I do it because I have learned my lesson too many times. We have a saying about this. If you are going to rush, you are going to make people laugh. Work the Greek leaf and the Roman leaf first if this is new, and the Corinthian after that, because the Venetian version assumes you already have the anatomy in your hands.

What are the pipes and the eyes?

Pipes are the convex ribs running through the leaf and eyes are the sunken hollows beside them. Wherever I put an eye I owe it a pipe, and wherever I have a pipe I owe it a concave on each side, or it will not read. Nothing in that pairing is decoration. Shadow lives in the eye, light lives on the pipe, and the two of them are how a flat panel pretends to have depth.

My eyes on this room are big. Huge, some of them. That is what they did back then, and once you start looking at the originals you cannot unsee it. Around the biggest head the leaves interlock. One curls inside the next, that one slides underneath it, and the whole business locks together in a spot no camera will ever reach. I hollow the inside into a real bowl. Sometimes a dome. Nobody standing in that room will get a clean look at it, and I still take it to a finish, because I know what is in there.

There is a second way to build a head like this, by the way. Glue the upper layer onto the lower one and carve the two of them as separate pieces, which sounds like cheating and is not. Early Byzantine carvers worked that way so the inside could be gold leafed. People look at an Orthodox carving with gold down inside a hollow and cannot work out how the leaf got in there. Once you know what they did it is not complicated at all. We build one that way later.

Which gouges does this take, and why does the number lie?

Sweep numbers do not mean the same thing in every country, and that catches people out constantly. A number two from Pfeil is a nearly flat gouge with a slight bevel. The same number from Ashley Iles is a skew chisel, and I suspect Henry Taylor marks it the same way. Same number, different animal. The steel is beautiful in both, and honestly the Sheffield steel might be the best there is, but you cannot order by number alone.

Gouge and number	What the number really means across the brands	Its shape	Where it earns its keep here
Pfeil number eleven	Pronounced U shape, so cuts come cleaner	Deep U	Undercutting and every deep shadow line
Ashley Iles eleven	Wings barely turned, closer to a gouge	Shallow U	Long sweeping movements, less deep work
Any number nine	Ground half round, so corners do the digging	Half round	Concaves, plug cutting, setting outlines in
Pfeil number two	Almost no sweep, just a shallow bevel	Almost flat	Final smoothing where marks must vanish
English number two	A skew chisel, a completely different animal	Skewed edge	Riding an edge, cleaning tight triangles
Back bend gouge	Curved back so it reaches under details	Reverse curve	Undercutting without cranking fragile edges

Ask me why I reach for the number eleven more than the number nine and there is a real answer. A nine is a true half round, so I am digging with the corners of it. An eleven is more of a U, and I can lay it over and work with one side, which gives me a cleaner wall.

On this project I want the Pfeil eleven for that reason, the pronounced U. My Ashley Iles eleven barely turns its wings up at all and behaves almost like a gouge, so it goes to different work. The full tool argument lives in All about tools.

Wall thickness decides the deep work. My 2 mm number eleven from one maker has thick walls and stops early. The 2 mm Two Cherries micro is thinner and keeps going. For the tightest triangles I use a micro number three, one eighth inch, 3 mm, by Peter Benson, because it is genuinely thin and does not build stress in the wood.

And every one of them has to be sharp like a surgeon's knife. When it is right I put no pressure on the tool at all. It rides on the surface and shaves by itself. You could shave your face with it, and I am not exaggerating. If yours is dull, none of the rest of this helps you, and sharpening is its own course for a reason.

What happens when the wood breaks?

Wood breaks in these workshops and I leave the breaking in the video. An edge went on me in workshop 13. No bueno, I said, and then I said it was meant to be that way, which is my usual excuse. I could glue it back. I just do not want to. So the separation gets bigger and nobody will ever know it was not the original design, except it is original, because I am the one still making it.

What actually causes it is cranking. Levering the tool against a neighbouring part, or pushing straight down and building stress into the fibres. When you see the wood start to move, the wood is telling you to stop rather than push through. A back bend gouge fixes half of it: because the blade curves away, I am no longer levering on the fragile edge, and I can reach right under a detail that a straight tool cannot touch. The other half is relief cuts, every triangle, every time.

Sometimes I cannot see the edge at all, no matter how I turn the piece. That is when I listen. A gouge tells you whether it is cutting cleanly or tearing, and by the end of the head I am carving by ear more than by eye. Hearing the wood is not mystical. It is just what forty years of the same sound does to you.

How do you finish a surface that is going to be painted?

Paint changes the whole calculation. This room gets painted, and the client wants to see brush strokes, so it goes on with a brush and not a sprayer. Paint sits on the wood like another layer, which softens the finest line work until some of it disappears. Knowing that in advance lets me be braver with the shadow and lighter with the polish.

Which brings me to the rasps, and I have to be honest with you here. I stayed away from them for years. I did not believe in them. They looked to me like they did not belong in the wood carving world, because my own teacher never used one and neither did the famous carvers I studied. Then I watched a carver get good results with one and I asked myself, why not try. On a commission that gets painted at the end anyway, why not. Now I catch myself wondering why on earth I waited so many years to pick one of them up. My children would call it a cheat code.

After a rasp I will sometimes break the surface with Mirka mesh at 220. It is not really sandpaper, it is a mesh you can see through, and it leaves far less abrasive behind. Sandpaper dulls tools, so I only ever reach for it where I have already finished working. But the Italians liked everything softened, no crisp look anywhere, and that is the point of this room.

One last piece of the puzzle is the blank itself. I glued it up thick on purpose, and thickness is freedom: I can excavate as deep as I want without losing the overall movement.

Plug cutting takes the bulk out fast. Rotating a quarter inch number nine straight in, almost like drilling, five eighths of an inch, 16 mm, at a go, then a second plug right beside the first.

And when the tools pile up I lose them, so I try to keep two or three out at a time. I try. Some days my bench looks like a scrap yard and I cannot find the one gouge I need.

Nothing here gets edited out. I will not spend the hours taking my own mistakes away, because the material runs to months of watching as it is. The whole point of the school, as far as I am concerned, is that this is not a demonstration. You are in the shop with me while I solve a problem I made for myself that morning, and some days it looks exactly like that.

If the reasoning in the last few paragraphs is the part you want, this room is where I do most of it, and the tuition covers all fourteen blocks of it. Start at workshops 1 through 12 if you have not seen the panel glued up, or come straight into these thirteen and carry on to workshops 26 through 37 afterwards. The design thinking on its own is Principles of Design, and flowers of the kind that will cover part of this panel sit in the Venetian rosette.

Do not chase equal spacing, by the way. If two distances on your leaf measure the same, the eye reads it as a mistake, and I spend a good part of workshop 17 pulling a middle line over because of it. Lines should not run parallel. They should aim at a point somewhere. It has to be narrower there than here, and it took me a long time to be able to say why.

Ca d Oro is still standing in Venice, and the high relief work inside buildings of that period has outlived every one of the men who carved it. Mine goes up near the ceiling of that room, and if I have done my part, a stranger looking up years from now will not think about me at all. They will just think the room was always like that. Pick a leaf and let us get you there. Shall we carve?