Members’ wisdom
John worked with wood for more than sixty years: boat and rod building, turning, carving, restoration and pyrography. He was also a geologist, whose work took in ecology, palaeoecology, palynology and oil and gas exploration.
Between 2012 and 2018 he kept a blog, “Wood caricatures and spirits”, recording what he carved, where the ideas came from, and what each piece taught him. It is gathered here so that it stays with the group.
Carvings and photographs by John Freake, shared with the kind permission of his family.
21 December 2012
John’s first heads, made by working through W. Pete LeClair’s book Carving Caricature Heads & Faces. Each is mounted on a cork bottle stopper.
He left the knife marks rather than sanding, sealed the wood with linseed oil, used acrylic for the eyes and teeth and thinned oil paint for everything else, then waxed and brushed them once dry.
23 December 2012
An early try at caricaturing familiar British faces. John was fairly pleased: each of the three carried something of the person he had in mind.
24 December 2012
Three heads John was honest about not liking. The middle one looked like its subject; the two either side, in his view, did not.
His two lessons: get the basic proportions right before anything else, and never use pure black or pure white paint, because it pulls the eye away from the rest of the carving.
26 December 2012
The start of John’s move to unpainted caricatures, sparked by a character in an American carving magazine and by a friend who rides a motorbike in Australia.
He carved them from green wood and dried them in a microwave on the defrost setting. First he bored a stress-relief hole up from the base as far as he could, then sealed each figure in a plastic bag and gave it four four-minute bursts, opening the bag between each to let the steam out.
26 December 2012
A memory from John’s Kent childhood: a local tramp the children called Smokey Joe, who got about on a bicycle with no tyres and everything he owned hanging from the handlebars.
The pattern and tips came from a Donald Mertz article in Woodcarving Illustrated (Spring 2010). The character is in the details: split shoes, a trouser patch, torn knees and elbows, burst shoulder seams. It was his first go at deep undercutting with a detail knife to throw shadow, which he found needed good light and a very sharp blade.
26 December 2012
John’s first serious attempt at depth and shadow without any paint. He used a Harley Refsal article in Woodcarving Illustrated (Spring 2011) for the pattern and to learn the conventions of Scandinavian flat-plane carving.
He was after simplicity, and some speed after slower, more detailed pieces. The rule he worked to: a cross-section through an arm, the body or the head should come out roughly octagonal, with deeper cuts where you want shadow.
27 December 2012
Ozzy, an Ozark mountain man, and Olgit, both from the collection Caricature Carving: The Best of Woodcarving Illustrated. With clear drawings to follow, John carved them quickly with a knife.
This post also sets out how he finished his work. He never used abrasives, since they soften detail and destroy the burnish a sharp blade leaves. Instead: scrub the carving in warm soapy water to lift hand grease; blot it, and while it is still damp coat it generously with three parts boiled linseed oil to one part turpentine, dabbing off the excess (this stops the grain lifting); leave about two weeks; brush on wax, let it harden for a few days, then buff with a soft brush that reaches into the cuts. He started with beeswax and later changed to Renaissance wax because it resists finger marks.
28 December 2012
“Lofty”, the sort of old-country figure you might meet at a Scandinavian festival in the American Midwest. John deliberately broke the flat-plane rules here, mixing them with his own style, and used the piece to practise stylised folds.
28 December 2012
John chose this one for its body language, something he said he had paid little attention to before. The whole figure reads as misery. He exaggerated the folds in the baggy trousers, did around nine-tenths of the work with a knife, and reached for gouges only for hollow cuts.
28 December 2012
Drawn from a cartoon for Disney’s Fantasia, chosen for the movement in it. The figure is carved from a single piece, and the awkward symmetry meant several scaled sketches first. The knife did most of the work, including the deep folds of the tutu; small gouges handled the hollows.
28 December 2012
Based on a Keith Howard article in Woodcarving Illustrated (Summer 2011). John wanted to understand how Howard got such depth, and after many hours felt he had got there, largely through deep “framing” cuts made with a very sharp knife.
He carved it within three months of the tree coming down. To head off drying cracks he flattened the back with a chainsaw and cut deep grooves along it into the heartwood. Two years later the wood was dry and uncracked.
28 December 2012
First in class at the Sussex Woodcraft Society annual show, 2012.
Carved in wet birch two months after felling, with the back flattened and grooved as on the apple spirit to balance the shrinkage between heartwood and sapwood. The face is framed by deep knife cuts that set it in shadow. John liked Renaissance wax, originally developed for the British Museum, because it dries hard and doesn’t take finger marks.
11 January 2013
The five knives John did most of his carving with, which had made many of his other tools redundant.
A Swedish Mora knife (5 cm blade, 10.5 cm handle) for roughing out. Four North American-style knives with 3 cm blades and 13 cm handles, broad blades for heavy roughing and slim ones for detail. The blades came from Warren Cutlery; he made the handles himself from offcuts of lignum vitae, lacewood, and Brazilian tulipwood with ebony, shaped to his own hand after a Carl Johnson article in Woodcarving Illustrated (Spring 2011). Holding close to the tip, he found, gives the most control.
11 January 2013
Caricature carving needs very little space, so John built a small portable bench, 38 cm wide, that hooks over the edge of any table. The idea came partly from Marvin Kaisersatt’s book Creating Caricature Heads in Wood and on Paper, with a carving post of John’s own added.
At the front is a carving ledge (probably Czech in origin) to brace the work. On the left, a bench-top carving arm holds a head on a small carver’s screw. Behind the ledge, the post turns to give different faces to lean a piece against while cutting away from the holding hand; its broad base stops it spinning under pressure. Post and ledge are faced with cork for grip, spare holes park tools, and a leather strop charged with compound sits on the right for honing.
26 January 2013
A piece that sat roughed out in the workshop for a couple of years until a New Year resolution got it finished. John’s own design, from a magazine photograph, it recalled the onion sellers with strings of onions on their handlebars he saw in France and Belgium on geological fieldwork, with good lunches along the way.
The right eye is meant to wink, which he admitted needed more practice. It was also his first caricatured ear, carved to satisfy a fellow carver and geologist who always inspected the ears.
30 January 2013
Caricature birds whittled from green cherry laurel cut from John’s hedge. The idea came from Chris Lubkemann’s The Little Book of Whittling, which John rated highly for knife work in green wood, and from Lubkemann’s articles in Chip Chats.
The Choirmaster had lost a few feathers from years of travelling to shows.
12 June 2018
John’s own mood on deciding to give up, for the time being, trying to control a golf ball. With the grain running vertically, the club shaft was weak short grain, so it needed a temporary support frame while he carved it. The close-up is worth it for the expression.
12 June 2018
A caricature of a friend who organises craft shows, caught at the moment a show opens and everything is going to plan: eyes shut, tongue out, one big sigh of relief. John’s verdict was that the strong cedar grain hides the expression, and lime would have shown it better.