Читать книгу Woodcarving Illustrated Issue 72 Fall 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 23

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a professional artist whose carvings were

worse than mine and I thought, ‘Hey, I can

do better than that!’”

Fred often carves in mezzo relief, which

falls between high and low relief. He enjoys

the challenge of using the limited depth

available to enhance the linear composition.

He boosts the illusion of depth using

perspective, foreshortening, and judicious

undercutting, and by overlapping and

compressing elements and warping the

planes.

Betty’s Spies

, a piece that won Best

of Show honors at the 2010 International

Woodcarvers Congress (IWC), now in

Maquoketa, Iowa, is a good example of Fred’s

mezzo-relief style.

Fred is no stranger to in-the-round

carvings as well and has won many awards

for pieces ranging from small busts to life-

size human figures and from caricatured

works to sylized and realistic figures.

He averages 15 to 20 smaller pieces and

four to five major works each year. Fred

carves most often in butternut, which he

harvests and mills himself. His political-

science background sometimes surfaces

as social commentary in pieces such as

Rest Easy Tonight

, which lampoons the

degree to which the country’s reaction to

the September 11 attacks benefited defense

contractors.

Fred sometimes works in green wood,

which requires him to switch to other

projects while the wood dries and stabilizes.

He has no shortage of ideas to move on to.

“Any good artist becomes increasingly aware

of his or her environment. The more you

do, the more you should find inspiration

in that environment,” he said. “There are

far more ideas than time.” The ideas and

new opportunities often leave carvings

interrupted. “Demands pop up,” he said.

“Other things come along.”

Among the things that came along in the

late 1980s was a request from Henry Taylor

Deck of 51,

carved

in 2010, is made of

butternut and

is 15 ½

" tall.

Betty’s Spies

,

carved in 2010.