Alexander Grabovetskiy, woodcarver, School of Woodcarving · Published 2018
Is wood carving a trade, a craft, or an art?
Quick answer: Wood carving is all three at once, and which word you reach for usually reveals where you learned. Taught as an evening pleasure it stays a craft. Taught as a paid skill it becomes a trade. It turns into art at the point where you decide to leave your tool marks on the surface.
All three, and which one you call it depends mostly on where you were taught. Northern Europe hands it to you as an evening hobby and calls it a craft. Russia handed it to me as a skill you feed a family with, which makes it a trade. What lifts either into art is the tool mark you decide to leave.
Ever been asked what you actually do, and caught yourself hesitating? Does hobby feel too small? And when a stranger calls your work a craft, does something in you want to argue the point, even though you could not say exactly why? I put that question to a workshop once and the answers split the room.
Workshop 24 of Carving Hashemi Flowers is where I talk it through while rounding two berries, and where the honest answer turns out to be all three at once.
Three answers that are all correct
- Craft, when the measure is skill of hand.
- Trade, when it pays your rent, and that one word changes how you are taught and how fast you are expected to get there.
- Art, when you leave marks.
- Ancient work, done with the same tools and the same thinking as two thousand years ago, whatever word wins.
- Something no machine has managed yet, and undercutting is the reason.
Where does the craft answer come from?
Scandinavia mostly teaches the work as a pleasure. Go to Sweden and the neighbouring countries and you will find it offered the way pottery or a language class is offered, something you take up in the evening because you want to, and the teaching is built around that. Nothing is wrong with the approach. Some people who learn it that way reach real art.
What the hobby framing changes is the clock. Nobody in an evening class has to finish a customer's panel by Friday, so nothing forces the awkward skills, and awkward skills are where carving actually lives. You can spend twenty happy years never once cutting end grain you were afraid of.
Where does the trade answer come from?
Russia treated it as a skill you could earn with, and I was taught inside that idea. A paid trade gets taught differently. It was not an evening of feeling good with a chisel; you were expected to produce work somebody would hand money for, and the teaching assumed that from the first day.
| Word | What it measures | How the teaching changes because of it |
|---|---|---|
| Craft | skill of the hand | evening classes, your own pace, and no pressure to finish anything you started |
| Trade | whether somebody will pay for the result, which is a harder test than it sounds | deadlines |
| Art | what you leave on the surface | nobody can teach it, and every teacher quietly hopes it turns up anyway |
Neither upbringing is better. They produce different carvers, though, and knowing which one you got explains a great deal about what you find easy. A hobby carver often has lovely patience and no speed at all. Somebody trained as a trade usually has the reverse problem and has to be talked into slowing down.
One more thing that word decides: what you buy. A hobby carver can own three gouges and be perfectly happy for a decade, because nothing arriving on Friday demands a fourth. Work for money and the shelf fills whether you meant it to or not, since every commission brings one shape your existing sweeps cannot follow. A working shelf ends up shaped by commissions rather than by taste.
What makes it art rather than tidy work?
The marks. Take a good photographer to a beautiful place and they will make a picture worth real money, because composition is a genuine skill and there are fewer people who understand it than you would think. Send a painter to that same spot, with the same light, and you get a different object entirely.
The painter takes far longer, even counting the hours a photographer spends in Lightroom afterwards. And what comes back carries brush marks. Those marks are why the canvas can sell for more than the photograph of the identical scene. Carving works the same way: the ridges left by a gouge are the brush marks of this trade.
So I keep them. On a piece like this I want the surface to read like a cut stone with every facet showing, and sanding it flat would throw away exactly what took the longest to earn. That is a preference and not a law, and I will say so plainly: keeping the work clean is not the same argument as sanding it smooth.
Other traditions disagree and they are entitled to. Sanding belongs to a different culture with its own history, and some customers ask me for it directly. A few have sanded my carving smooth and painted over the whole thing. What can you do. As long as they pay I have no complaint, and I still think it looked better before.
When something does need softening, a Dutch reed does it without flattening anything, which is why that plant turns up in this course rather than a sheet of abrasive. Ridges survive it, and only the fuzz goes.
Can a machine do this yet?
Routers have not got there, and the reason is mechanical, not a question of better software. Computer controlled routers are real and they are useful, and there is no CNC machine on the planet that will carve what is on my bench this afternoon. The limit is simple and mechanical: a cutter comes down from above, so it cannot reach underneath anything. Undercutting is where this panel lives.
Printing is a different argument. A 3D printer will give you form and shape in any material you like, and I think it genuinely belongs to how things will get made. If form is what you are after, use one. It will beat me on speed and on price and it will not get tired.
What it will not give you is the movement itself, the thing I mean when I say a line is beautiful. A printed leaf has a surface nobody decided on. Every ridge on mine is a place where a hand chose an angle, and across a whole panel those choices are what a person feels standing in front of it without being able to say why.
How old is this argument?
Older than any of the words we are arguing about. Same tools, same setup, same thought process as two thousand years ago. The only real difference between me and a carver from then is which of us is better. Not the technology. Him and me, gouge for gouge.
The oldest description of a carver I know of sits in Exodus. Bezalel, the man who built the Ark of the Covenant, not Noah and not the big boat, worked in wood and stone and metal. The text says God filled him with wisdom, knowledge and understanding.
I would add a fourth to that list: patience. You will spend a long time in one small area, and you will not be able to hurry it, and something in your character gets rebuilt while you wait. Anybody who wants a thing finished quickly has walked into the wrong trade.
Carving is also subtraction, and subtraction is a kind of reasoning. You are not adding a shape, you are deciding what to remove so the shape that was always in there is finally free, and three dimensional thinking is the muscle that does it. That muscle is trainable and the design course is where we train it.
Does knowing the answer change anything at the bench?
It changes what you forgive yourself for. A carver who has decided this is a craft can stop when a piece stops being fun, and that is a perfectly honourable place to stop. Somebody carving as a trade cannot, because the panel has a date on it and the customer is real. Neither of us is braver. We have different contracts.
Customers sit on both sides of it too. Some understand what hand work costs the moment they see a carving, and some never will, and part of my job has always been the explaining. The ones who do not understand are not being rude. They have simply never watched anyone spend three hours on something the size of a walnut.
What does the bench say while you argue?
Very little, and it keeps working. While all this gets talked through, two berries are being rounded using a number 4 at 10 mm, separated with the V tool, refined with a number 5, then a number 7 at 10 mm, three eighths of an inch, to bring them fully round.
Round is the wrong word, actually. They do not have to be perfect circles, and looking closely at a real berry on a real plant you find it never was. Push every one to a true sphere and the group starts to look manufactured. Leave them slightly unequal and the eye reads fruit. There is more on that in the workshop on beads and berries.
A knife handles a lot of it faster than gouges do. The number 12 is an excellent tool for any kind of carving, and on small round forms I get there quicker with it than by fetching three different sweeps.
Height is the other thing being judged while all this gets talked about. Three berries further along looked wrong to me, plainly too high for their neighbours, so they came down under a number 5 at a quarter inch and then got reestablished from the lower surface. Deciding that took ten seconds and cutting it took twenty minutes. Most of carving is arranged that way round.
The spot itself is awkward because of end grain, which I say out loud while working it, and the area is weak enough that a smaller tool is simply safer. End grain has its own workshop in this course, and the rule there is the rule here: less bite, sharper edge, no forcing.
What actually keeps the tool from tearing?
Slicing. Every cut goes sideways as it goes forward, never straight ahead, and pushing a gouge dead on into the wood is the mistake beginners make for a year. Slicing, slicing, and slicing. That is the whole secret, and on the weak spots around these berries it is the difference between a cut and a broken element.
Two things make slicing easier. One is a long bevel, and almost every tool on my shelf carries one, far longer than the short bevel a new tool arrives with. Low bevel means much less resistance through the fibres. Short bevels I keep for oak and for mallet work; the sharpening course covers how to get there.
The other is support, and mine comes from a finger. Watch my hand on these small elements and the little finger is parked under the work, holding up the thing I am cutting so I do not have to press. It arrives naturally after enough years. When I come from the other side, the whole flat of the hand goes underneath instead.
And use the V tool constantly. Relief cuts are what let everything else happen safely, which makes it close to the number one tool on the bench, whatever people say about it being hard to sharpen. Sharpening one is not hard. It is a combination lock: you can know all the numbers and still fail by doing them in the wrong order.
Want the hours rather than the argument about what to call them? Every workshop sits inside tuition at the school, and this page is where people begin. Bring basswood, a sharp gouge and an evening.
So call it what you like. A man in Sweden carving a spoon after supper and a shop in Moscow filling an order do the identical physical thing with identical steel. So did Grinling Gibbons did it too, for money, and nobody calls the panels he left behind a craft project. The word follows the work. Get the work right and the argument settles itself.
One last thing about the word. Whatever you decide to call it, the tools do not care, and neither does the wood. A gouge asks the same question of a hobbyist and a professional: are you sharp, are you slicing, and do you know where the grain goes. Answer those three and the panel comes out well whichever word is printed on your business card. Tools and a map of the lessons are where to go next.
How it's done
- Name what you want from it. Pleasure, income, or something to leave behind. The answer changes what you practise and how hard you push yourself.
- Leave the ridges alone. Resist flattening the surface. The marks a gouge leaves are what separates a carving from a moulded shape.
- Slice, never push. Move the edge sideways as it travels forward. A straight push into the fibres is the commonest beginner mistake.
- Lengthen your bevels. New tools arrive with short bevels. A long, low bevel meets far less resistance and makes slicing possible.
- Support with a finger. Park your little finger under whatever you are carving so the pressure of the cut has somewhere to land.
- Reach for the V tool often. Relief cuts let every other tool work safely. Treat it as the first tool on the bench, not a specialist one.
Frequently asked questions
Is wood carving a dying trade?
Fewer people earn a living at it than in 1800, certainly. Demand for hand carved work has not gone anywhere though, and anyone who can genuinely deliver it tends to have more asked of them than they can take on.
Can a CNC machine replace a hand carver?
For flat ornament and repeated mouldings a router does fine work. Anything undercut defeats it, since the cutter arrives from above and cannot reach beneath a shape, and undercutting is what gives relief its shadows.
Should a wood carving be sanded?
My own panels never are, because ridges catch light and a sanded surface goes flat. Other traditions sand as standard and produce beautiful results. Decide which of the two effects you actually want, and do it before any abrasive comes out of the drawer.
What to carve next