Design principles for wood carving 2

The baroque and sinister diagonals are the two main corner-to-corner lines on a board. In my chalk drawing the baroque one climbs out of the bottom left corner and ends at the top right, while the sinister one drops through the upper left and lands in the far bottom corner. Every design has a diagonal. Usually two main ones, and the golden points of a board all land on that pair.

You have a bare board and a flower you want on it. Where does the big flower go, and which way will the whole design move? I work that out at the chalkboard in this lesson, before any carving starts, by finding the golden points, picking the main one and then giving it a bad guy.

What this lesson settles about the two diagonals

• Each of the four lines of a board has a golden division, so one board gives you four golden spots.
• Red marks the climbing baroque line in my drawing, and blue marks the falling sinister.
• Those golden spots all sit on the two diagonals.
• I chose the main idea, the hero, before I started to carve my panel.
• A hero needs an antagonist, and mine sits on a golden point too.
• The last two spots fight each other and back the big pair, and a golden spot can be almost empty.

Why does one board have four golden points?

Say we have a board, a vertical board, and we have to use it. Question number one is direction. But that creates the problem, because the golden ratio is question number two, and a board like that has four golden ratio spots on it.

Four, because the board has four lines and every line has a division. Which point you get depends on the side you start on. Start on this side and go toward that side, and there is one golden section, then start at the other point and end up here, and there is another one, and going up and down works the same way. Somewhere right there, around 60 percent along, the point lands.

Going up or going down is another rule, by the way. Will the design grow or fall? Say you carve flowers, and the question is what you want to express with them, dropping flowers or growing flowers. I built the frame for all of this in the first lesson of this course, and the golden ratio itself is the old proportion of about 1.618 to 1.

Which line is the baroque and which is the sinister?

Then comes the third rule, the rule of diagonal movement, and diagonals play a really big role in a design. Each space has one. Most often it is two main ones.

In this lesson the red line starts low on the left and rises to the upper right, and that diagonal is called baroque. The blue one is sinister. It drops through the top left corner and comes down on the right, crossing the red one on the way. When I ran the questions again in the last lesson, I said it short. Baroque goes this way, which is right, or it goes sinister.

Now we know there are two diagonals. Those golden points, they all hit those diagonals, so the next thing to ask is which one will be my golden spot. Any board you pick up already has these two, since a diagonal just joins one corner with the corner across from it.

What do the names of the two diagonals mean?

I told the class that baroque here means right, just like left and right, and that the true translation of the word is strange. The name has nothing to do with an era of art. Sinister, I said, means evil.

Dictionaries tell it a little differently. Wikipedia traces baroque to the Portuguese barroco, a flawed pearl, while Wiktionary gives sinister as the Latin word for left, and in heraldry the sinister side of a shield is the bearer's left.

Then I gave the class some advice about your wife or your husband. If he's the right person, design something for him on a baroque line. But if he's not too nice, design something on the sinister, hand it over with a here you go, honey, and don't explain a thing.

And I told them a secret. Go through the fine art, the true art, and all of it is based on those two lines, either a baroque movement or a sinister movement. Most people don't know those secrets. They were passed down, master to apprentice, and I found only a couple of books that deal with the baroque movement and the sinister one, even though every true master knows that stuff.

How do you pick the main golden spot?

With four golden spots, what are we going to do? We have to figure out which one is going to be the most important, and again we go back to who my customer is.

A section is just where we cut that rectangle, but the golden spot is the main idea of the whole design.

Take the floral panel in this lesson and ask who the main guy is. The peony. If you just take golden ratio calipers to it, it lands exactly on 1.62, and it sits in perfectly, just pleasing to the eye. Folks say the name of that flower one way or another, depending on what part of the United States they're from.

Before I started to carve it, I made the decision. Which flower would be the main one? I wanted a main point to drive the eye to, not my eye but whoever's eye, and that is my golden spot, my main hero, if you wish.

The other spots don't go away, though. They're also golden, and your brain is still going to catch them and keep looking at all four of those points while just a single point stays the main.

Golden spot	What it does on my peony panel	Lesson part
The main hero	Holds the main idea, the point I drive the eye to	Finding the golden spot
The antagonist	Sits on a golden point too and fights the hero	Hero and antagonist
Two smaller spots	Fight each other while each one backs a big guy	Conflict of ideas
A bare spot	Has almost nothing on it and still works as support	Conflict of ideas again

Why does the main flower need an antagonist?

First of all, there's another rule. Every hero has an antagonist, like in the movies, where if there's one good guy there should be one bad guy. In art we call it the law of war, the law of conflict. Everything in nature has a conflict, and there's a fight going on all the time.

My superpower on this panel is that peony. The antagonist is right there, the bad guy, and he falls on a golden ratio point too, which makes it the main fight on the panel.

So there are several golden spots in every design. It's more than one flower with a few petals, and you really have to hit the antagonist. If there's no fight, there's no interest. This bad guy is powerful too, and he has emptiness around him. A whole page on the second focal point shows the same idea on a furniture panel.

See the swirl near the bottom? The movement starts with it and goes upward, and that's how the brain reads it without you ever thinking about it. Your eye still goes into that swirl, and it is not an underdeveloped element. It looks organic to the eye because it wasn't just me expressing myself. In this case the movement went up the baroque, left to right, like the bus going uphill that I drew in lesson one. So it grew.

And the movement you start with is not always what catches the eye. We're not explaining any of this to the people who look at the carving, because the one who makes it is the one who has to understand how the brain works and how people are going to look at it.

What can spalted wood teach you about conflict?

I asked the class if they knew what spalting is. Spalting is a war between fungi, mushrooms on a micro level, and it rots the wood. Study a nicely spalted piece and you can see it split up like countries, with a border between the fungi drawn in a black or dark brown line.

On all of those pieces, one fungus conquers the most territory. He's the hero of that piece. The others surround him, and usually there are two or three colors in a board, a greenish one, sometimes pinkish, sometimes bluish. And here's the interesting part. The lines don't cross each other, they just move the territory slowly, and while the fungus is alive that movement goes on. Wikipedia calls those dark borders zone lines.

So if you like spalted wood for wood turning, dry it really well before it rots to death.

What happens to the two smaller golden spots?

That leaves two more golden spots. They're not golden, per se, and not the main idea, yet we can't ignore them, because they still matter.

These two have to be antagonistic to each other too, and they're supposed to fight. But see where they stand. One is on the side of one superpower and the other is on the side of the other superpower, so while they fight, they support the main guys. That means they must be much lesser. Still important, though.

In the last lesson of the course I ran the whole list of questions in order, and after the main idea came the antagonist. Which of those four points will it take? It's supposed to sit on one of the lines, and that's how we decide baroque versus sinister. Then who supports who? The two points that are left have to support, and you can read that run of questions in lesson four.

Can a golden spot stay empty?

Check what surrounds one of those guys. He has a spot next to him that is empty, and that's also part of the design. The emptiness works as a support too. Space around makes a big difference, and right there, on a golden ratio point, there's almost nothing at all. Painters call that kind of room negative space.

Emptiness and busyness fight for the idea too. One guy says it's supposed to be empty, the plain is better, and the other one, the secondary golden spot, says no, the busier is better, more is better. Again, it's a constant conflict. When you look at the flowers, you see more than an expression of beauty, because there's a war of ideas going on, even in a simple design. I go further into space in lesson three, and the furniture course has a page on fixing a crowded acanthus design.

Is less really more in carving design?

Modern design said less is more, which is not true. That motto belongs to the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as Wikipedia notes. I've been in some of the most expensive houses in the world, and there's no such thing as less is more in those houses.

Do you know about the lion heads I carved? They're on the doors of the house I showed the class. More is more in there, and when you walk inside you see what you don't see in museums, because all those little things are original work from the Renaissance era.

And see those two statues? Only two guys in history made their names as wood carvers and became famous, I told the class. One of them is Grinling Gibbons, and before him, in the 15th century, there was Tilman Riemenschneider, a German, before the Reformation. Those two figures in the hall are his work.

Wikipedia lists Riemenschneider as a German sculptor and woodcarver who lived about 1460 to 1531. Even the lines in that house are all based on the golden ratio, on fight and conflict. There's one main guy, but he cannot exist on his own.

Where do the two diagonals show up in other lessons?

In lesson three I came back to the sinister and the baroque movement. Even on an acanthus leaf, most of the time it's still going to be on one of the diagonals, never a straight line, either growing or falling. And inside the leaf one part still falls while another part grows.

The Carving Furniture Panel course puts the same rules on a real panel. One page finds the golden center on an awkward board, another follows the way the eye travels across a panel, and a third builds a root rectangle. Part two gives the law of conflict a page of its own. On the peony panel the movement went up the baroque, and the bad guy took a golden point of his own.

Shall we carve?

The whole course starts on the principles of design in wood carving page. Tuition runs monthly or yearly and renews automatically until you stop it, or you can pick a course and carve along.