marymaycarving said:
Boooo! (I've got to stay off these forums - put myself in some deep kim-chee)
Mary, I've not met you yet and I may not have followed where you are going here. Just to be 100% clear, i try to go to the Wmsburg conferences each year. At the end of the conference, Jay Gaynor takes suggestions from the audience for next year's topic. Suggestions the audience doesn't like get grumbles, "no's" or boos. It's a fun crowd really. I suggested uphostered pieces once and that got booed. I hoping someone will shout out carving, but it's possible the crowd will reject the idea.
Carving, as I see it, has a lot of the stuff that would work well for a conference like this. There's a wide range of period carving to suit everyone's taste. The WD has a few fine carved pieces of furniture, and there are many good carvers to call on for speakers, including and especially Mack Headley.
For period woodwork junkies like me, there's the whole tool culture stuff that I love- what tools they had or didn't have, how they used them, etc etc. I'd like to see more of this type of stuff covered in general.
I think sharpening gouges, vees, etc would be an important portion of any such conference. We've seen little bits and pieces of carvings, but it would be good to take a better look at the entirety of the subject.
Most interesting for me is the manifestation of a craftsman's esthetic values in his work. I see different regions at least producing fairly distinct work. In Philadelphia, Bernard and Jugiez produced very 3 dimensional relief carvings that I really like. This was distinct from other Philly carvers. Pretty sure Mt Pleasant has an Affleck chest on stand (or chest on chest with crooked legs) with a Jugiez cartouche. Instead of the standard asymmetic and somewhat abstract centerpiece, Jugiez carved a basket of flowers and acorns, which I really like.
I think it's fun to see those guys expressing themselves in what is really art work and equally fun to try to recreate work exhibiting their sensibilities. I've been trying to do that in cabinetry, but you can obviously do that same thing in carving alone.
Adam