Why is wood carving dying art?

Wood carving a dying art is a claim I only half agree with. I have carved for over forty years, and the trade did shrink around me while the skill stayed where it was. Buyers stopped paying for the hours, and the shops answered them. What is left is the work nobody can order cheap, and there is more of it than I can carve.

I am going to be honest with you. For years I believed this trade was finished, because of one sentence out of one man. When I came to United States, one of the guys knew that I am a wood carver, and he said, well, nobody needs wood carving in United States. He had no idea what it takes. Just because of that advice, I lost many years not carving.

A corbel blank across my lap, the layout still in pencil over the roughed scoops.

Below is the honest count. What shrank, where a machine stops, who sits in my classes now, and what to do about it. The long version of how I got here sits in my own introduction.

• The market got small. The skill itself never went anywhere.
• Clients ask for cheap and they ask for yesterday, so the shops that repeat things won that fight.
• A CNC can run 20 hours on one panel and still look plasticky. No machine undercuts.
• Apprenticeship is the part that really died, and almost nobody in Europe teaches that way now.
• My students include doctors, lawyers and professors, plus carvers who have been at the bench for 40 and 50 years.

Is wood carving really dying, or did the trade just get small?

Hand carving shrank as a trade, and the skill itself did not die. I do not necessarily agree it is dying. Thousands of people still carve. What some people call a dying trade is a shrinking market with all of its knowledge intact.

Both halves of that are true, and I have said both of them out loud in different rooms. Wood carving is not a common trade any more. Not too many people are doing it full time, so in a sense it is a dying trade or skill, I would say. And it could be bad stuff, it could be good stuff. It all depends how you look at it.

The whole bench from above, a row of gouges at the left, the drawing taped down flat.

Now the other sentence I say, which sounds like a contradiction. On all of planet Earth there are not too many wood carvers. Some people saying it is a dying craft. It is not. Lots of wood carvers are out there. They just have no idea how to make money and how to charge. That is a business problem wearing a heritage mask. I put the numbers I know into how much money carving actually pays.

The part that changed is the quality. The quality of carving is definitely changing, and changing quality is a very different thing from a dead craft. A trade can lose most of its shops and keep every skill it had, so long as somebody at the top end still works by hand. The plain version is what wood carving actually means, plus the general history of the craft.

First passes on an oak apron rail, the scroll still mostly pencil.

What actually changed in the last twenty years?

Speed and price changed, and the buyer changed with them. When clients come and they want to get something done, furniture or a carving piece or anything, they want it done cheap and they want it done quick. It has to be done yesterday.

It does not matter that it took them years to decide whether they want to do it or not. So it is quick, fast and cheap. Which is precisely what you get when you ask for quick, fast and cheap.

You can see the result on any shop floor. Even when you go to furniture stores, you barely can find any really good quality furniture. The only quality furniture is probably just done by hand, by masters. But it used to be different. Even 20 years ago you could find really good furniture done in this country, or done in Italy.

Leaves and flowers in warm oak, my forearm resting across the top of the carved band.

Whole categories of carver went too, and nobody counts that loss. In the European tradition, including the British English tradition, there are four types of wood carver. It used to be at least four types. Right now the case is different, and what survives is two major types.

I will not invent names for the two that went. Where did the hours go? Into a price. Even in the furniture stores you can barely find really good quality furniture now, and twenty years ago you could.

A small V-tool going around one flower on the apron, a second tool lying ready beside it.

The apron in these frames is one whole class, filmed pass by pass. Watch it in carving a dining table apron.

A bent V-tool travelling along a curved rail whose flower and leaves are already shaped.

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Did machines take the carving work away?

No. The machine never reached the work I do, and I have said why in a hundred lessons. I know CNC. I used to work in a shop, and I had a shop with a CNC in it. So I can tell you what that machine is good at and where it stops dead.

Even the carving on a CNC machine sometimes takes 20 hours, or even longer, so the machine will run longer than 20 hours. Exactly the same piece by hand is going to take you probably at least one month. And the hand one is going to look a lot better.

The full run of the acanthus frieze, scroll after scroll, carved deep enough that the leaves stand free of the ground.

One man wrote under a video, oh, it is impossible, you did it by a CNC, you cannot do that by hand. And a CNC simply cannot. Another carver put it better than I ever could. When his CNC sees a wood carver work with his hands, the CNC just runs to the corner, sits quietly, and weeps.

Put the two methods side by side on one job and the split gets easy to see.

Straight down over my shoulder into the same frieze, both hands on the gouge, chips everywhere.

So the honest sentence is the other way round. A hundred identical rosettes is a job for a router, while one rosette that has to sit beside an old one is a job with no file to copy from. That second job is the subject of carving a replacement to match an antique, and the pointing machine was built for it long before electricity.

Two panels, a roaring lion head on each. I am working the ornament above the mane on the right one.

What can a machine never carve?

A machine cannot go underneath. No machine, even the armed one, can undercut inside and go in. Look at one of my pieces and look how deep the excavation is. There is no CNC machine whatsoever able to do that.

Roses and peonies undercut until the flowers stand clear of the ground, clamped upright in bright window light.

The second thing the machine leaves out is the one I care about most. Carving by machine lacks the most important part, human touch. And I think human touch is what makes wood carving really, really unique. When you see the marks, a human hand did it, not the machine. Machine work comes out plasticky.

The third thing it cannot reach is a whole style. In that style, Grinling Gibbons style, there is no CNC yet invented to do that type of carving. Just a human hand. The most advanced tool on your bench is your hand. Read the record of Grinling Gibbons and his work, then come and see the same movement in the Gibbons class in Maine.

A bent gouge worked in under one acanthus lobe from below, fingers steering it. This is the move no machine makes.

Here is the part that is easy to miss. Hand carving belongs to the ancient trades that did not change a lot. When you are carving you cannot make it quicker. Doing a piece of carving takes exactly the same time it took 200 years ago. It would take a wood carver 300 years ago, or 500 years ago, the same time. A thousand years ago, the same time.

A skill nobody can speed up will never be replaced by speed. Carving sits among the oldest skills on planet Earth, and in thousands of years it did not develop too much. A wood carver from the 19th century, the 17th, the 15th, would do a piece exactly like what we do, with the same tools and the same hours. So it is one of the skills which is preserved, I would say.

Depth is what relief carving costs, and depth is paid in hours, which is why my run through the Corinthian acanthus leaf is nothing but that arithmetic. And who still teaches Gibbons style carving is the next fair question.

The acanthus panel alone, no hands and no tools, every lobe deep enough to throw its own shadow.

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Which part of wood carving has really been lost?

The old apprenticeship is the endangered part, and it is nearly gone. The best way to learn carving is to become an apprentice, like the old days, apprentice of a master. And apprenticeship is not a one week workshop at some woodworking school. It takes years.

The old way is a master and apprentice approach, when the apprentice watches over the shoulder of his master. Not the case any more, and you almost cannot find that approach in Europe. I was apprentice of a master wood carver from the age of 16, and my teacher was not just a carver. He was an artist. Go looking for the masters I learned from on Russian land and you will not find them. The country was locked down.

A full size pencil drawing pasted over oak, one shield shaped area chopped down to bare wood.

Worse than that, the knowledge was never written down. Most people have never been told those secrets, if you wish, because they were passed generation to generation, just master to the apprentice. And no books, almost even now, they do not exist. Only a couple of books I found which actually express the Baroque and the sinister movement. But every true master, the titled masters, they know that stuff.

Now count how thin the thread really is. Only two men in all of history made their names as wood carvers and became famous. One of them is Grinling Gibbons. Before him, in the 15th century, it was Tilman Riemenschneider, a German, before the Reformation, before they burned the stuff down. Two names, out of every carver who ever lived. I wrote about why Riemenschneider left his limewood unpainted.

The same panel later, the ground out around one shield while the rest of the design is still paper.

Britain keeps an actual register of this problem. The Red List of Endangered Crafts counts how many people still work each trade and how many teach it, and it publishes the ones it grades as endangered crafts in Britain. UNESCO keeps its own lists of living heritage, down to an entry for traditional wood architecture. Such a count measures whether anybody stands beside a master long enough to catch what he knows.

Venice solved this once, simply. The masters who knew how to carve stone or wood gave that skill away to younger generations by just showing the techniques they do. An apprenticeship was not lectures. Men were inside the shop daily, watching the process and getting the way those masters did the work, and the craft guilds kept that door open. One day I thought maybe I can work the old European way, pretty much apprenticeship, when people come to my shop and watch. Which is exactly what you are doing right now, actually, watching what I am doing. The whole Venice Room series exists for that.

The knife point turning the eye of a chalked spiral on the acroterion.

Who is actually learning wood carving right now?

Doctors, lawyers and university professors, mostly. A lot of people in my school are not involved in the woodworking at all. They are in different professions. Some of my students are doctors, some are lawyers, and a few are professors from universities.

Beginners are not the whole room either. People email me their work. I have students who carved over 30 years, over 40 years, over 50 years. They are much older than me, and when they send me a picture I just humble myself.

A steel straightedge along the edge of the fan, the volutes still chalk and pencil.

Here is one number that surprised me. Last year my site was almost crashed because 5,000 people logged in and watched almost the same video, so I had to move it to a separate server. A dead craft does not knock a server over, and my in person classes fill in eight minutes. One of them is the class I teach at Marc Adams.

Money is not why I teach. Believe me, I was making a lot more money when I was just doing boxes every day, just cabinets. The school is a non profit, so read where the tuition actually goes for yourself. My own story is on the site too, prison cell and all.

A small gouge following a felt pen line around a deep hollow in the leaf.

Take the next part as my reading of the room, not research. The people carrying this skill now are mostly not carvers by trade. They have other careers, and they wanted the three dimensional world badly enough to buy the tools themselves. Different engine from a guild, slower too, and it does not close when a factory closes. Honestly, not many are left who go to the degree we go to. Public money helps at the edges, where national arts funding and the Smithsonian American Art Museum keep the work visible. The fun side of wood carving is most of why they stay.

A roughed pierced wreath in the vise, three chalked bosses left to shape.

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How long does a hand carving really last?

Limewood carving from the 15th century still looks fresh today. Go to palaces in England and see all the work there, or go to Germany, into old churches with 15th and 16th century carvings, and you will be surprised. All of it is limewood, and it looks really nice and fresh.

Old churches also tell you which wood people trusted. If you go to old churches, the old ones, you can find beautiful carvings there, but all done just in oak. And I believe the first person who introduced limewood to England was Grinling Gibbons. That wood is Tilia, and its American cousin is basswood. The numbers are in how long wood carvings last.

The rosette is still a pencil drawing on the block, but the outer ring has already been lowered.

Another reason we still hold the knowledge is that somebody repaired the old work. David Esterly wrote a couple of books about Grinling Gibbons. Really good books. He used to restore Gibbons work, and a man who takes an old carving apart to save it learns how it was built.

The tip of a small gouge set into one petal, chalk marking the lowered grounds.

The knowledge came back that way once. A carving from the 15th century is still on a wall in Germany. Sooner or later somebody repairs it, and repairing it teaches the repairer how it was made. So the knowledge walks back into living hands. Institutions pay for that one job, among them the Getty Conservation Institute, the American Institute for Conservation and the National Park Service.

Twelve petals inside a turned ring, clamped between two black bench dogs.

Go and stand in front of the real thing if you can. The National Trust houses in England hold rooms of it, and the sculpture collection at the V and A holds more. One hour with your nose close to a panel from the 17th century beats this whole page. The rosette in these frames came out of that kind of looking, in an antique style rosette class.

Shavings resting where they fell on a half carved scroll.

How do you keep this skill from dying in your own hands?

You learn it in the order a master would teach it, and you do not skip the middle. This work has three parts. Design comes first, sharpening second, and carving is the most important of the three.

Step 1, learn to draw the ornament before you touch wood

Design is not drawing pretty pictures on paper. Design is the laws of space, rhythm and repetition, plus understanding what the tool wants to do. My teacher taught me to think like a tool. Draw the acanthus ornament full size until your hand knows the movement, then paste it on the board. That habit is the whole of the principles of design in wood carving.

One curl of shaving lifting off the ridge of a scroll as the knife travels along the pencil line.

Step 2, sharpen until the tool slices instead of tearing

Sharpening comes second, and it is the one nobody wants to spend an evening on. You cannot carve anything with dull tools, it is just absolutely impossible. A dull gouge tears the wood grain, and my teacher's answer to that was blunt: no such thing as a bad piece of wood. It is dull tools. That is the only problem. Work through carving tool sharpening, or begin with the first sharpening lesson.

Step 3, carve one ornament badly, then carve it again

Carving matters most of the three, and it is the one you cannot hurry. The same piece takes the same hours it took 500 years ago. So carve one small leaf, look hard at what went wrong, and carve that same leaf again next week. Two honest attempts teach more than twenty projects abandoned halfway. That stubbornness explains why carving is difficult, and it answers how to improve your carving technique better than any tip list.

Both hands driving a wide chisel into the lower edge of the panel.

Step 4, put yourself where somebody is actually working

Watching is the old method, and it still beats reading. Get into a shop, or a class, or a livestream, or a camera over a bench, and watch somebody carve for hours. An apprentice did exactly that, which is why teaching yourself wood carving works better with a bench in front of you. With no idea where to begin, read how to start learning wood carving. The Greek acroterion class is one place to start.

Step 5, hand the skill to somebody younger

There is a need to pass on some of the skills which some people consider is a dying trade. That sentence is the whole reason this school exists. God gave you that talent since childhood for a purpose, and a purpose is not a hobby you take to the grave with you. Teach one person. One is enough to keep a thread from breaking.

A long gouge shaft lying in one deep lobe of the acanthus, thumb below it.

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You have read the count. The trade is smaller, the skill is intact, and the only thing genuinely at risk is whether anybody stands close enough to a master to catch it. Shall we carve?