This year I started working on a series of works for a solo show. Birds are my focus but what I’m actually highlighting is the marriage of my art and woodwork. While you can see them as one and the same, the approaches to them are very different. Art is loose and thrives on expression. Woodworking is more rigid and requires more measurements. Sure the approaches can be interchangeable but I can be a purist sometimes. So when building a box or frame, I want to do it the way a fine woodworker would. And vice versa, when I illustrate I want to convey an expressive image the way an illustrator would. Switching my mindset through each piece for this series has been a doozy. Many times through this series I’m working too loose or too rigid in specific steps of the work. I have been embracing the flaws in my work more. Because most people won’t notice your screw-ups but if they do they might have a good chuckle out of it. And that's fine because, at the end of the day, it’s art. Not an airplane.
I started working on this piece back in August. Though the idea for it came months before. I had been sitting on this wood it's carved from for a while. I knew I wanted this to be for the dove in the series but wasn’t sure how it was going to look. My first idea was to carve a dove’s tail, rather than the whole bird. I drew out some ideas to get a sense of how it would love but without altering the wood, I felt it wasn’t very enticing. Of course, I started to draw doves but then I thought they were following a trend. Most often, illustrations depict doves flying. While I love that birds can fly, I felt for this dove that wasn’t original enough. Going into this piece, I knew two things I wanted. To use the wood intended for it & making a frame using dovetail joinery. With these points in mind, I led myself to make a dove that was in a resting position. Because I wanted the joinery on this piece to feel as loud as the carved dove. In a way, it feels like the dove is not trying to draw attention to itself.
I wanted to stray from the idea of a flying dove in its synonymity with certain religious groups. While I have no quarrels with that symbolism, that's not what I wanted this piece to represent. Aside from showing off dovetail joints, I wanted to show off my own rapport with rest. Living in a culture where ‘content is king’ and ‘hustle culture’ I wanted to oppose that and brag about how cool rest is.
There is irony in that representation. Because I worked a lot on this dove. The carving took much longer than expected. Due to my own procrastination but also because I knew a lot of sanding was going to happen. And then building up the courage to cut the dovetails was nerve-wracking. I watched all the videos I could on cutting this joint. No amount of information was going to triumph over the act of cutting these things. I took a couple of test runs and then during my class in Tampa, I got to cut dovetail joints for my toolbox. After cutting those I felt more confident to tackle the ones for this frame. And by no means are these suckers perfect. But being one of my first serious dovetail joints, I’m content with them.
This is the fourth bird in a series of twelve. As I continue this series, I hope that the marriage of my two worlds will converge and feel homologous.
A dovetail joint. This type of joinery pre-dates written history. It carries value in its appearance and strength. Tails are made of cherry wood and the pins are made of walnut wood. I chose to use two different woods to emphasize this joint even more.
