EveGriffinArtWork

Beaver

Alaska (yellow) cedar

10¼ x 18¾ x 3 inches

1994

 

This was my first carving. While living in Petersburg, Alaska, I enrolled in an evening woodworking class. I was talking to a friend about the need to come up with a project (book ends? a book case?) when he offered me a piece of old growth Alaska cedar he had riven from a stump in the forest.  ‘This is some of the best carving wood in the world,’ he said.  ‘Maybe you could try carving.’

 

Nine months later, I had spent all my spare money on carving tools and was still desperately trying to figure out how to sharpen them. I had nothing to show my class instructor at the end of the term beside a few tentative gouge marks in this ever-so-rare, straight-grained, clear slab of ancient wood. The growth rings are too fine to count without a magnifier, but the tree from which the wood came lived for many hundreds of years.

 

I persevered over the next year, using the carving as a way to learn about the great Northwest Coast art tradition, with books from the local library as guide. I felt almost lost in the ocean of unintelligible formline languages that comprise these art forms.  In my ignorance, I made something that resembles a traditional crest panel from a funerary pole and can only hope that this piece does not offend any who might recognize it as such.