Woodcraft

“ In the old pioneer days, every hunter used to make himself a lamp, for it was much easier to make than a candle. It is a good stunt in Woodcraft to make one. Each woodcrafter should have one of his own handiwork. There are four things needed in it: The bowl, the wick, the wick-holder and some fat, grease, or oil.
For the bowl a big clam shell does well.
For wick a strip of cotton rag rolled into a cord as thick as a slate pencil, and about two inches long; a cotton cord will do, or perhaps the fibrous bark of milkweed or other native stuff is the truly woodcraft thing. ”

“ And this boy cannot even read or write and probably never heard the word “woodcraft.” His school has been the school of hard knocks. He knows these things as a matter of course just as you know your way home from school. His father is a woodchopper and has taught him to take care of himself.
If you desire to become a good woodsman, the first and most important thing is to learn to use an axe. Patent folding hatchets are well enough in their way, but for real woodchopping an axe is the only thing. One of four pounds is about the right weight for a beginner. ”

“ As the Woodcrafters left the building, Zan called after them: “Remember to bring a finished product of your carpentry for the next Council!”
CHAPTER FIVE—A PRIZE CHEST The following week, every member of Wickeecheokee Band was busy after school, working hard on their carpentry. Some had decided to make wooden toys for the little ones, some preferred odd pieces of furniture, such as a foot-stool, a tabouret, a waste-paper-basket, etc. The older Woodcrafters were busy making more difficult things as they had had some practise in the handling of tools and wood. ”

“ There are a lot of little helpful wrinkles regularly used by woodsmen that can hardly be imparted to the green-hand because of their number, their insignificance, and the fact that each must be adapted to the prevailing condition, but they immediately brand the user as an old hand at the game. They are simply the result of experience and are used almost unconsciously. I refer to such things as the manner of placing wood on the fire, handling embers, moving cooking utensils, etc. ”

“ By these experiences I learned that the most practical form of compass for a woodsman was an open-face, watch-shaped instrument, without a stop, and with a ring by which it could be fastened to the coat or vest like a watch. ”

“ What I have said of the material of the ax head applies with equal force to the ax handle. It should be of sound, strong, straight-grained, springy wood, for sometimes a broken ax handle is as disastrous as a broken blade. I have never found a better wood for ax handles than good second-growth hickory, but young white oak, the sapwood, is almost as good. ”

“ Whatever be the art which the wood engraver imitates, a practised eye sees at the first glance that the result is nothing but a woodcut. Therefore, although we may admire the suppleness of an art which can assume so many transformations, it is certain that these transformations give little satisfaction to severe judges. At the same time, as the ultimate object was not only reproduction, but reduplication by the printing-press, the drawbacks mentioned are far outweighed by the practical advantages. In manual skill and in variety of resource modern wood engravers far excel their predecessors. ”

“ Of numberless examples a 15th-century chest (Plate III. fig. 6) in the Kunstgewerbe Museum, Berlin, may be referred to. The arrangements of foliage, &c., on top, back and front, are typical of Gothic at its best.
End of the 12th century–1300.—As this section treats of wood-carving in Europe generally, and not of any one country alone, the dates just named must be of necessity only approximate. The 13th century was marked not only by great skill both in design and treatment, but also much devotional feeling. The craftsman seems to have not merely carved, but to have carved to the glory of God. ”

“ Woodwork was decorated with painted ornament or with fanciful work on the hinges; and nails and clamps were applied to hold it together, rather than with sculpture, down to the fourteenth century; and in England, France, and Germany, oak was the wood employed for furniture. Both in England and in the countries which had retained old artistic traditions on the continent, such as Italy, France, and Spain (which profited by the skill of the Moors in painted decoration) , colour was used not less on walls and wood than on metal and pottery. ”

“ Daily practise with the tools insures a manual dexterity with which no amateur need hope to compete. Many traditional expedients are handed down in this way that can be acquired in no other. There is, however, another side of the question to be considered, of quite as much importance as the practical one of handicraft skill. The art of wood-carving has also to fulfil its intellectual function, as an interpreter of the dreams and fancies of imagination. In this respect there is little encouragement to be looked for in the dull routine of a modern workshop. ”

“ The woodman at work — Tree-cutting in frosty weather — Preparing sticks and stakes — Winter Jasmine — Ferns in the wood-walk — Winter colour of evergreen shrubs — Copse-cutting — Hoop-making — Tools used — Sizes of hoops — Men camping out — Thatching with hoop-chips — The old thatcher's bill.
It is good to watch a clever woodman and see how much he can do with his simple tools, and how easily one man alone can deal with heavy pieces of timber. An oak trunk, two feet or more thick, and weighing perhaps a ton, lies on the ground, the branches being already cut off. ”

“ Style.—From the remotest ages the decoration of wood has been a foremost art. The tendency of human nature has always been to ornament every article in use. Just as a child of to-day instinctively cuts patterns on the bark of his switch freshly taken from the hedgerow, so the primitive man, to say nothing of his more civilized successor, has from the earliest times cut designs on every wooden article he is accustomed to handle. The North American Indian carves his wooden fish-hook or his pipe stem just as the Polynesian works patterns on his paddle. ”

“ Although his spirit was romantic and uncontrolled, and his imagination dealt with forms not in themselves beautiful, he possessed the greatest energy of genius of all the masters who have intrusted their works to wood-engraving, and with him it was a favorite art.
The first of the four famous series of designs by which his skill in wood-engraving is best known was published in 1498, but it was probably finished before that time. It consisted of fifteen large cuts in illustration of the Apocalypse of St. John, to which a vignette (Fig. 40) of wonderful nobility and simplicity was prefixed. ”

“ Witness the old coloured screens of Norfolk, the harmonious greens and reds, the proper proportion of gold, the panels adorned with saints on backgrounds of delicate diaper work, and compare these triumphs of decoration with the rougher blues and reds of the average restored screen, and one ceases to wonder why we now prefer the wood plain.
Of late years carving has gone out of fashion; a change has come about. The work is necessarily slow, thus causing charges to appear high. Other and cheaper methods of decoration have driven carving from its former place. ”

“ More broadly, a landscape shot with the evanescent shadows that hover in rapidly moving mists, or the intermingling light and gloom of a wind-swept moonlit sky half overcast with clouds, wood-engraving has no power to mirror in true likeness. ”

“ His representations of peasant life are peculiarly attractive, because of the force of realism displayed in them, whether he depicted the marriage festival, or mere jollity or drunken brawl. In the breadth of his interests, in the variety of his subjects, and in his sympathy with the special movements of his age, he was as an engraver more characteristic of the civilization in which he lived than any other of the Little Masters who gave their attention to wood-engraving. ”

“ It is only by accident or negligence that woodcuts were left uncolored in early German books, for the conception of a complete picture simply in black and white was a comparatively late acquisition in art, and did not guide the practice of wood engravers until the last decade of the century, when, indeed, it effected a revolution in the art.
Of the many other illustrated Bibles which appeared during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the one published at Augsburg, about 1475, and attributed to Gunther Zainer, alone has a peculiar interest. ”

“ Form, therefore, is left as the main object of the wood-engraver’s craft, and the representation of form is effected by delineation, drawing, line-work. This is why the great draughtsmen, such as Dürer and Holbein, succeeded in designing for wood -engraving. They knew how to express form by lines, and they did not attempt to do more even when suggesting color-values by the convention of black and gray. Line-work is thus the main business of the engraver, because form must be expressed by lines. Line-work, however, is of different kinds, and all kinds are not equally proper for the art. ”

“ The harmony of related parts—the balance of shaft and handle or the geometry of the twist—makes the auger a decorative object. This is not to say that the ancient woodworker's tool is not a document attesting a society's technical proficiency—ingenuity, craftsmanship, and productivity. It is only to suggest again that it is something more; a survival of the past whose intrinsic qualities permit it to stand alone as a bridge between the craftsman's hand and his work ”

“ Wood-engraving was at once the product of the desire for this change and of the effort toward it, a mirror of the movement the more valuable because the art was more intimately connected with the popular life than any other art of the Renaissance, and a power feeding the impulse from which it derived its own vitality. In this fact lies the historic interest of the art to the student of civilization. ”

“ Bending to a certain extent does not weaken wood, but stretching the same has been found to impair and destroy its strength.
The principal problems which the inventors of the century have solved in the class of wood-working have been the adaptation to rapid-working machinery of the saw and other blades, to sever; the plane to smooth, the auger, the bit and the gimlet to bore, the hammer to drive, and a combination of all or a part of these to shape and finish the completed article. ”

“ Finally, the author has endeavoured in these pages to treat wood-carving not merely as a fine art, whose chief aim is to produce specimens of fancy work for exhibitions, and facsimiles of flowers, never to be touched, but also to qualify the learner for a calling, and what nine-tenths of all practical wood-carving really consists of, that is, house and other large decoration, and of work which is to be perhaps painted, and exposed to the air. ”

“ WOOD-CARVING, the process whereby wood is ornamented with design by means of sharp cutting tools held in the hand. The term includes anything within the limit of sculpture in the round up to hand-worked mouldings such as help to compose the tracery of screens, &c.
Material.—The texture of wood limits the scope of the carver in that the substance consists of bundles of fibres (called grain) growing in a vertical direction without much lateral cohesive strength. ”

“ Owing to the invention of various mechanical processes, and the perfection to which photography has attained, the art of wood-engraving would seem to be in danger of becoming extinct. This is by no means the real case, for the brilliant band of wood-engravers which has arisen in America, of whom we have just spoken, still continue to give us excellent examples of their skill ”

“ Wood-engravers, if the design given them to reproduce is in black line, fit for engraving in wood, must copy it simply, and then, should artist-draughtsmen arise, the art in this manner will again produce works of permanent value as in the days of Holbein; if, on the other hand, the design given them is in color or washed tints, or anything of that sort, they must interpret it by lines of their own creation, and then, too, should any engraver-draughtsmen arise among them, the art will possess a similarly high value ”

“ German wood carvers were more quaint, minute, and redundant as to decoration. Something of the vigour, manliness, and inexhaustible sense of humour of the Germans characterises their woodwork, as it does other art, of which ornament forms the main feature. The well-known "Triumph of Maximilian," though a woodcut only, may be taken as a type of German treatment. The great cities of the empire are full of carved woodwork, house fronts, and gables. Timber was abundant. The imagery of the period, in wood as in stone, is intentionally quaint, contorted, humorous. ”

“ In delineating rocks and the bark of trees, especially, he fails; in drawing he sometimes makes errors, particularly when what he represents was not subject to direct and frequent observation; in the knowledge of line-arrangement, too, he is less masterly than some of his successors, and, in this respect, his work is characterized by effectiveness and spirit rather than by finish. Yet, when these deductions have been made from his merit, so much remains as to render him, without doubt, the most distinguished modern engraver in wood. ”

“ In the middle of the fifteenth century, therefore, wood-engraving, the youngest of the arts of design, after fifty years of obscure and unnoticed history, held an established position, and was recognized as a new craft. In art its discovery was the parallel of the invention of printing in literature; it was a means of multiplying and spreading the ideas which are expressed by art, of creating a popular appreciation and knowledge of art, and of bringing beautiful design within the reach of a larger body of men. ”