Design principles for wood carving 2

A carving panel carries two diagonals, one climbing and one falling, and the line you build along decides whether the design rises or presses down. Every golden crossing on a board sits on one line or the other, so choose the diagonal first and the flower that owns it second.

You found your golden spot. Then you drew the frame properly and four of them appeared, one on each line, all equally golden and all pulling at your eye. Which flower goes where? I watched a room full of good carvers stall on exactly that question, and the answer is not arithmetic.

It comes down to two things nobody teaches. A design travels along a diagonal, and there are only two of those. And a main idea cannot stand alone, because a picture with no argument in it is a picture nobody looks at twice.

What you are actually deciding when you place a flower

• A rectangle carries four golden crossings, one per edge, and only a single one can lead.
• Two diagonals cross the panel. The climbing one is called baroque, the falling one sinister.
• Each crossing sits on a diagonal, so picking the line narrows the choice before you measure anything.
• The main flower needs an opponent, because a panel with no argument inside it gets one glance and no second look.
• Leave a crossing bare and it still works. Emptiness argues against clutter, and that argument is the design.
• The lesser two back the big pair and stay visibly smaller, or a panel ends up with three loud voices.

Why does one board have four golden points and not one?

A rectangle has four sides, and every one of them gets divided. Take a vertical board. Measure the golden section along the bottom edge starting from the left, and you get a point. Start from the right instead and the point lands somewhere else entirely. Two more come from doing the same thing up each side.

Four intersections appear where those divisions cross. All of them are golden, and your eye finds every single one whether you meant it or not. That is what catches people out, because three of the four cannot simply be ignored and trusted to behave.

None of this needs mathematics beyond a ruler. Euclid set the whole thing down as a line divided in extreme and mean ratio, and on a board you can do it with a tape and a pencil in under a minute. The slow part is deciding which of the four you actually mean, and that is a judgement rather than a measurement.

A second question hides inside this one, and it matters on flowers. Going up is not the same decision as going down. Growing flowers or dropping ones? A stem that rises tells one story and a stem that spills over an edge tells another, and you settle that before the first line goes on the wood. I work through the whole frame in the first lesson of this course, where the armature gets built from a circle and a square.

What do the two diagonals actually mean?

Corner to corner, and there are only two. Start at the bottom left corner and run a line up to the top right. That climbing line is the baroque diagonal. Start instead at the top left and drop down to the bottom right, and you have the sinister.

The names are old workshop words, not my invention, and they carry a mood. Sinister is simply the Latin word for left, and over the centuries it picked up everything else it now means. On the board I mark the climbing line in red and the falling one in blue, because after ten minutes of chalk you stop being able to tell them apart otherwise.

You will not find much of this written down. It moved from master to apprentice and stopped there, and in forty years of looking I have turned up only a couple of books that treat the climbing and falling lines properly at all. Every true master knows it. Almost nobody publishes it, which is why a carver can work for years, do clean work, and still wonder why his panels sit quiet.

Here is what to do with them. Something rising, hopeful, meant for somebody you like, belongs on the climbing line. Something heavy, or a piece that should feel like it is coming down on you, goes on the falling one. I tell students a private version of this with a straight face. Look at your husband or your wife. Build a piece for the right sort of person on the climbing line. For somebody less lovely, well, hand over something on the falling line, smile, and say nothing. Go and look at serious painting with this in your head. You will start seeing which line each picture was built on, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

All four crossings land on a diagonal, one line or its opposite. So the diagonal is not some separate rule bolted on afterwards. Pick your line and half the decision is already made, which is why I put this ahead of the measuring and not after it.

How do you choose which point gets the main flower?

Ask who is going to stand in front of it. A piece for a client reads differently from a piece for your own wall, and the direction that client's eye enters the panel is the thing that decides. I covered that reading direction in the law of movement, and the same question comes back here, asked about the whole panel instead of a single edge.

On the panel I use through this whole lesson, the main guy is the big peony. Lay a pair of proportional calipers across that carving and the leg lands on the flower at 1.61803398875, which is the full number behind the 1.62 I use at the bench. None of that was luck, and it was not taste either. I picked the spot before a single chip came off the board.

What you place	Where it belongs on the drawn frame	How big	What it does for the panel
The hero	Strongest crossing along your chosen diagonal	Biggest thing	Holds the eye and sets a mood
Its opponent	A crossing over on the opposing line	Nearly equal	Gives the hero something to push
Two supporters	Whatever crossings are left over	Plainly smaller	Take a side, keep it alive

Why does a design need an antagonist?

Without a fight there is nothing for a viewer to hold on to. Every hero has an opponent, in films and in a carved panel alike, and the rule sits underneath both. In art we call it the law of conflict. I would go further than that: there is a fight going on everywhere in nature, and design that pretends otherwise reads flat even when every leaf is carved well.

The antagonist on my panel sits along the other diagonal, and it is nearly as strong as the peony. Not equal. Nearly. The two big ones argue with each other, and the two smaller points each take a side, one behind the hero and one behind the challenger. That is four elements doing four different jobs instead of four flowers sitting politely in a row.

Keep the supporters honest about their size. The eye lands on them too, but they are not the big idea and must never look like it. Each one leans toward one of the two large elements, and a rectangle only gives you two camps to lean into. Make a supporter as heavy as the hero and you have three loud voices and a panel that argues with itself and says nothing.

The volute at the bottom of that panel is part of the same argument. People look at a swirl like that and call it decoration. Calling it filler misses what it does. It starts the movement and hands it upward, and if I flattened it the whole panel would sag.

Where can you see this conflict outside of a carving?

Look at a piece of spalted wood. Spalting is a war between fungi inside the timber, and what you are admiring when you admire a spalted bowl is the map of that war.

Each fungus holds a territory. Where two of them meet they build a dark barrier and stop, and that black line is a border in the literal sense. One fungus always ends up holding more ground, and there is your hero, decided by nothing but a slow war inside a log. The green comes from a fungus called Chlorociboria, and it has been prized in marquetry for centuries.

Usually two or three colours show up in one board, greenish most often, sometimes a pink or a blue. The borders never cross. They shift, slowly, the way a frontier shifts, but one fungus does not simply run through another.

One warning, since people turn this wood. While the fungi are alive the borders keep moving, so dry the stock properly before you work it or the piece carries on rotting after it leaves your bench.

Can a golden point be left empty?

Emptiness is a move, not a gap. A crossing near the bottom of my panel carries almost nothing, and that was deliberate. Space around a carving does as much work as the carving, and a bare golden point argues with a crowded one.

Think of it as two voices arguing. One wants air. The other says pack the thing, because more has always been better. Both sit on crossings and both are right, so neither wins. An argument left open is exactly what keeps a viewer standing in front of a panel instead of walking past it. I take the whole question apart in the law of space.

Is less really more?

Not in the houses I work in. Modern design says less is more, and I have carved in some of the most expensive homes in the world, where you walk through the door and see things you do not see in museums. Original Renaissance work on the walls. Nobody in those rooms was chasing restraint.

My lion heads hang on the doors in that hall. Along the wall from them stands a carved figure the owner attributes to Tilman Riemenschneider, who was carving in Wurzburg around 1500. Two wood carvers in all of history became famous under their own names, and he is one. Grinling Gibbons is the other, and he came nearly two centuries later.

People ask why a panel built this way looks organic when every line in it came off a ruler. Here is the whole trick. The eye reads the armature without knowing it is there, so the work feels grown rather than arranged, and nothing about it says measured. Students hear me say peony, by the way, and half the room says peon back at me, depending which part of the country they grew up in.

Standing my own work in that company is a joke I enjoy, and it is also the point. Those Baroque rooms rest on the same crossings and the same pair of diagonals I keep drawing in chalk. Nothing there is restrained, and nothing there is random either.

There is an old line in the book I believe in about a wise man making himself stronger, and I think it applies straight to a drawing board. Conflict is not damage. It is the thing that keeps something alive long enough to be worth looking at, whether that is a man, a stand of timber, or an acanthus scroll on a door. Jay Hambidge built a whole teaching method on these armatures a century ago and called it dynamic symmetry.

Go and put a straightedge corner to corner across something you carved. My guess is your best element already sits near a diagonal, and the weakest thing on the board is the flower you put in the fourth corner because it looked bare. That corner did not want a flower. It wanted an argument.

Shall we carve?

The rest of this lesson works all four points onto real panels, and the workshops after it take the argument into conflict of ideas and then into dynamic symmetry and the acanthus leaf. The third lesson picks up movement and space, and the hero and antagonist workshop is where the four points get names. For the whole path from the first chalk line, start at principles of design in wood carving. Want to try the ideas on a real flower first? The Venetian flowers rosette is a good place, and tuition runs monthly or yearly, renewing automatically until you stop it. You can also just pick a course and carve along.