Ah yes, finally! This has, without doubt, been the single most time consuming carving I’ve done, normally I keep track of the time taken in order to assign some sort of meaningful price to the object, however, as the hours ticked by and began to appraoch 20 hours of blister inducing carving I decided to ‘forget’ to record anymore hours?!
It did however give me a good chance to get to know this particular character:
Larry is something of an unpredictable fellow prone to contradictory outbursts espousing first one position in an argument before immediately taking up the other, of course this may have something to do with the argumentative mouth-piece that resides on the back of his head.
Some have suggested that Larry has become unstable over the years, no doubt as a result of continually having to justify himself to, well, himself. Inevitably his ‘sap’ pressure has risen to levels where his health really has been compromised, indeed, you can see it in his bulging eye!
It maybe won’t come as a particularly huge surprise that Larry is indeed, a piece of Larch wood, taken from an over-sized beast of a tree that had taken over my sisters garden and requires a certain amount of ‘pruning’. It’s an incredibly pale wood, almost pastel white, with a grain that’s almost indistinguishable from the rest of the wood. It creates a very subtle contour which is best seen in, well, in real life!
The finish here is acrylic paint with a coating of a couple of hard wearing varnishes.
I now have a shed full of this wood, much will be burnt in the stove although I’ve already picked out a couple of prime pieces for carving, not least of all a trunk section with two partially intertwined branches rising out of it … branches doesn’t really describe them though, maybe slightly smaller trunks. It’s about 3 or 4 feet tall and screaming out to be carved.
I may need largely gouges though!
Available to buy from the shop
Tags: abstract, carved, carving, craft, handmade, head, sculpture, whittle, whittling, wood, wooden
