I first wanted to carve wood when I was a teenager and after an amount of pestering, my father brought home a lump of balsa wood and a craft knife. It was not what I had in mind but he assured me it was the best he could do. I cut myself badly several times with the craft knife and cut the balsa wood even worse. Not a success. I wasn’t assertive enough to pester further and just retreated, somewhat crestfallen, but didn’t give up wanting to have a proper go.

My next attempts were at art college where the teaching staff recoiled in horror and left me to it, muttering disparaging remarks about the embarrassment of being a groovy art college with a student doing  “craft stuff”. Occasionally they would come and look at what I was doing, but not say a word, just raise an eyebrow or smirk. One tutor kindly advised me that chisels did actually need sharpening. Even more kindly he showed me, very briefly, how to sharpen a chisel on an oil stone…..and that was it.

Three years later I happened to be passing through Gloucestershire and went to visit my old art college. In the sculpture department the students were all standing at bankers…..carving wood. I was ahead of my time obviously…avant garde!!!

 I received no tuition whatsoever in carving at art college and thus consider that I am self-taught.

The first thing I carved at college was a large box without a top – each side carved in relief and with a miniature bed inside made from material, with a figure in the bed fast asleep, and the second thing a thirteen foot tall totem pole – an English Girl’s totem pole, complete with dragons, knights in armour, hills, cliffs, caves, the sea, rainbow, stars, moon, birds and all manner of flora and fauna and landscapes. Curiously, the first thing I carved on that totem pole, quite high up, was an eye, to look inside the wood I suppose.

After leaving college I did a year’s stone masonry and carving course in Weymouth where I financed my upkeep by working part-time in a pub. Stone carving is magical, because stone is so very ancient and wood carving is magical because of the life in it. In both cases carving is still done in the same way that it has been done for hundreds and hundreds of years using mallet and chisels, so there is a feeling of holding hands with the past in a long chain of people all linking right back to whenever.

After stonemasonry college, I worked briefly on the John Maine stone sculpture on the South Bank outside the Hayward Gallery in London but took so much skin off my knuckles in the process with the 3pound stone hammer  I gave up. At college I’d been told that you weren’t a real stone mason til you’d taken enough skin off your knuckles to make an apron……I then worked for a short while as a stone mason in Gloucester, Shropshire and Sussex. I never made that apron.

 I got back into woodcarving again in 1987 after the great storm felled so many trees and a friend who was working to clear the trees, brought me a good supply of tree trunks – mostly oak, wild cherry and beech. That set me off on a number of ¾ life-size figures.

In 1992 I had a baby and decided messing about carving wood was to be put aside and left behind as an era in my life I had finished with. Inconveniently, I was involved in a scheme planning  on building some wooden houses, which unexpectedly kicked off just 6 weeks after my daughter was born.

In order to do my share of the building hours I had to enlist family help to start with  - my poor father had his 70th birthday up scaffolding in the pouring rain one November working on my house, and later on I also had a reciprocal baby minding swap with somebody to earn myself days to build whilst somebody else looked after my daughter - I couldn’t afford a baby minder and had no family or friends to help look after her for free. It is harder looking after 2 babies for a day than helping to build wooden houses in my opinion!

We now live in the house I helped to build and of course……after a short while the idea that my wood carving days were over evaporated as  I was irresistibly drawn back into wood carving again.

The largest carving I have done is up on the cliff-tops at Crovie in Scotland – “Scottish Athena” (click here for image) - and the second largest is a commission I did in Lincolnshire, “Chair Lady”. The smallest is in a private collection and is a 5x5 inches relief carving “Face” (click here for image).

I have carved in shallow relief, high relief and in the round, using a wide variety of wood, and I also teach carving now and then and I suspect I will continue carving for the rest of my life, it just seems to be something I have to do.

EDUCATION

1980 - 1983 Cheltenham Art College, BA Hons

1983 - 1984 Dorset Technical College, CGCC in Stone Carving, Letter Cutting and Restoration

Currently studying the Art, Beauty and Inspiration Course at the Maryvale Institute www.maryvale.ac.uk