Design principles for wood carving 4

Two rules govern arabesque ornament. No line in it runs straight, and every line eventually rejoins the rest of the design. Follow any swirl out past where the carving ends and it has to come back and meet something. If it wanders off and joins nothing, the panel is broken, and a viewer feels that without being able to say why.

You can hold a gouge well, sharpen properly, and still produce work that sits there flat. I taught for years before anybody put words to the reason, and the words turned out to be very small ones: keep it curved, keep it off centre, and never let two lines meet square.

The short list I run before any design is finished

• Not one straight line belongs anywhere in the ornament.
• Every movement rejoins the design somewhere, even when the meeting happens off the board.
• A right angle between two lines makes a letter T, and the eye stops dead there. Curve it off.
• An S laid under the main movement tells a viewer which way the thing grows.
• Centre lines never sit in the centre. They sit at 62 and 38.
• Repeat your main curve at several sizes, never at the same size and never parallel.

Why should a carving have no straight line at all?

Straight lines do not exist in the thing you are imitating. Look hard at any leaf, any stem, any petal, and the closest you will find is a very slow curve. A straight line in ornament announces the ruler that drew it.

Now try the second half of the rule on that same panel. Pick any scroll and follow where it is heading. Keep going beyond where the wood stops, in your head, and it curves round to meet another part. Every single scroll does that. Not one simply leaves.

Choose a curve that cannot come back and the piece reads wrong immediately. Not weird, not modern. Wrong, in the way a chord played on the wrong note is wrong, and every viewer hears it whether or not they can name it.

Harmony is the word I use for what happens when all of it lines up, and harmony is not a feeling somebody invented. Fifteenth century work still stops people in a room. So does sixteenth, so does seventeenth. Objects two thousand years old are still being copied today, and a couple of strokes on a canvas with express yourself written underneath will not be there in fifty years.

Above the leaf or below it?

The S carries a main movement further without simply repeating it. When the design climbs, I lay a small S under the leading element so the eye picks up the same direction one more time, quietly, on a smaller scale.

Which side it goes on is not a matter of taste. A design that grows upward wants its S underneath, pushing. Turn the design over so it falls, and the S moves above it to press down instead. Put it on the wrong side and you have two arguments running in one leaf.

That single stroke does something odd and useful. Take a leaf with no stem attached to it at all, add the S, and anybody looking can tell you whether the leaf is growing or dropping. The stem became unnecessary the moment the S went in.

Why does a T junction kill a design?

A right angle between two strokes makes the shape of a letter T, and the eye arrives there and halts. All the movement you built collapses at that junction. It happens even when the crossing is not drawn, because a viewer extends both lines without thinking and the brain does the collision on its own.

So I sketch the T on the board next to the good construction, plainly, as the thing to avoid. Bend either line off the square and the stop disappears. Usually that means a change of a millimetre or two on paper, and it decides whether a finished panel moves or sits.

What you draw	What the eye then does with it	The verdict	What to do about it instead
One straight line	Reads the ruler and stops believing it	Never acceptable	Bend it, even if only slightly
Two squared strokes	Arrives at that junction and simply halts	T stop	Take one of them off square
One supporting S	Repeats the main direction one more time	Always welcome	Put it beneath a climbing design

How many divisions does an acanthus leaf have?

Three, or five. Never four and never six, and this is not a stylistic preference. Those are the numbers sitting in the Fibonacci sequence, and the leaf follows them the same way a flower follows them with its petals.

Each of those divisions holds three more. Where the subdivisions fall is decided by the same proportion as everything else in this course, which means a golden section rather than a halfway mark.

Here is the part nobody puts in a book. Draw the invisible boundary that wraps the whole acanthus, the outline you never carve. Measure one axis of it, call that 10 inches, and measure the other. The answer comes back at 1.618.

A student once asked whether that was in By Hand and Eye, the design book by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. Worth reading for its own sake, and the Rococo ornament it touches on is built the same way. Good book. It does not carry this, and I have not found any book that does. The logic moved from master to apprentice for centuries and mostly stopped there.

I call that boundary a boat shape, because it is a fishing boat hull with a twist in it. Once you can see the boat you can see whether a leaf is drawn correctly from ten feet away, which is worth more than any amount of measuring.

Should the rib run down the middle?

Anywhere except the middle. The rib running down an acanthus sits at 62 percent on one side and 38 on the other, and which side gets the 62 depends on where your space is biggest.

Compare the two areas that spine creates. One is a single unit, the other is 1.61 units, and you can check it in square inches if you doubt me. Jay Hambidge named that idea dynamic symmetry a century ago. Your own face is built on it, since one eye is slightly larger than the other on everybody alive.

There is a national argument buried in this, and it is real. Italians place that division out toward the edge. The French push it closer to the middle, still inside the golden range but fighting the idea rather than agreeing with it. Both are beautiful. They say different things, and I draw the Italian way.

None of this needs calculating at the bench. Buy proportional calipers and the arithmetic turns into a gesture you make without thinking about it. Take the checking as far as you like, and the further you take it the better the piece gets, though it will also take you longer. I spent one full class years ago doing nothing but design, every day, all week, and we built everything from pure geometry.

How does rhythm work in ornament?

Repetition with the size changed each time. Music does exactly this. The same phrase comes back, and the player hits it harder or softer, and nobody calls that repetitive because the volume carried the difference. A volute at the base of a design works the same way against the smaller scrolls answering it further up.

In ornament we change size instead of volume. One long arc, then a shorter one, then a shorter one again. Put a pair of calipers across any two of those curves and the relationship comes out near 60 and 40, without my ever having calculated it while drawing.

One warning about repeating a curve. Never lay the second arc parallel to the first. Everything in a leaf grows out of one point, so the repeat has to taper away from that same origin, which leaves the two curves slightly out of step with each other. I got that wrong on the board in front of the class and said so, because parallel is the mistake almost everybody makes first.

Watch where the eyes of an acanthus fall while you are at it. The eyes are the small intersections where lobes cross, and measuring from the start of a lobe to its end puts them on the same proportion as everything else, 62 and 38 rather than half and half. Fibonacci sits underneath the extreme and mean ratio Euclid wrote down, so the two never disagree.

The same discipline runs down to the smallest things on a panel. Three flowers means three different sizes, and a group of tiny ones exists to make a big one look bigger. We call those filler flowers. Even at 20 mm across (three quarters of an inch) I will not carve two the same.

Even the centre of a single flower obeys the rule. When I set out a Venetian flower I never put its middle in the middle, and I cut a small notch inside that centre to throw one spot of shadow. Shadow has its own five levels and its own lesson, so I will leave it there.

Then treat the whole group as one thing and repeat it elsewhere. If the first cluster holds eight flowers, the second holds five. Same idea, different count, different scale, and the panel gains depth from that alone.

Why is classical ornament still what wealthy houses buy?

Classical work lasts, and people can feel that it lasts. I have worked in a great many expensive homes, and I have never been called into a modern one. Columns and arches two and a half thousand years old, a Corinthian capital somewhere, Baroque mouldings. Always classical.

The condo somebody spends a week a year in gets the slick modern treatment. The house they actually live in does not. I did a library for one of those clients, and a shirt with his brand on it was hanging in my shop the same week, which I still find funny.

Eighteenth century furniture proves the same point without a single carved element on it. Take the plainest piece and it still curves somewhere. Curvature alone is the difference between furniture that looks designed and furniture that looks assembled.

So here is the sequence, in the order I ask it, on a bare board. Which way does the design travel? Which diagonal, climbing or falling? Does it grow or drop, and which half rules? Where is the main idea, and remember there is only ever one hero. Where does the antagonist stand, and who supports whom? What surrounds all of it? Then nothing straight, nothing centred, and repeat everything at a different size.

That is the whole course in eight questions. Answer them on paper in twenty minutes and you will carve a better panel than a man who answers none of them and works for a month. In arabesque ornament there is no such thing as a decision you can leave to the gouge.

One more thing and then I will stop. People are taught to express themselves, and I have no quarrel with a man expressing himself. My quarrel is with the idea that expression means ignoring the laws. Work inside them and what you express is the order you found there. Work outside them and what you express is your own ego, which is a smaller subject and ages badly.

Take something you carved and hunt for a T in it. Look for any right angle in it, and you have found where your eye keeps sticking. That is the cheapest lesson in this course and the one you can use tonight, on basswood you already have.

People ask how long the drawing takes against the carving. On a serious panel I will spend a week on paper and three months on wood, and the week is the part that decides whether the three months were worth spending. Nobody ever admired a panel for the hours in it. They admire it because their eye travels the way somebody decided it should, forty years ago, in chalk.

Shall we carve?

The rest of this lesson works every one of these onto real leaves, and it builds on the third lesson and on the first. The workshops here are dynamic symmetry and the acanthus leaf, the arabesque workshop, the law of rhythm in nature and the ten elements of classical design. Start at principles of design in wood carving, or put the rules on a real leaf in the Roman acanthus course. Tuition runs monthly or yearly and renews automatically until you stop it, and you can always pick a course and carve along.