10 Nov
2014

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By Hugh    No Comments

Symmetry and Artistry: RI Audubon Hosts Annual Bird and Wildlife Carving Exposition

Yellow-billed cuckoo, one of the carvings at the Exposition.

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“I take everything away that isn’t a bird, and what’s left is a bird.” Hmmm… if that instruction on bird carving sounds a bit too simple to be true, that’s because it is. And champion bird carver John A. Mello, Jr. knows full well it is. Mello, a Rhode Island resident with an elaborate handlebar mustache, is describing his experience carving wildfowl as part of a demonstration session at Rhode Island Audubon’s Bird and Wildlife Carving Exposition. The event attracted roughly 600 people who passed through the Environmental Education Center to view carvings of shore birds, raptors, song birds, even seals and trout throughout the two day session.

John Mello leads a demonstration.

Samples of Mello’s technique.

Fifteen artists displayed their wares at the Center, including Michael McCarthy. McCarthy, a burly man clad in a Patriots tee shirt and sporting a beard and shaved head, looks more like someone who belongs at the helm of a fishing trawler than as a bird carver. Yet here he sat, with a lap full of pine shavings, busily working on a shore bird while chatting with visitors.

Mike McCarthy at work on a pine creation.

Another part of McCarthy’s process on display.

McCarthy has made a living carving birds for 37 years, and all those years of carving mean he often doesn’t need a model for his work. “I have about 150 species in my head all the time,” he says to a visitor, all the while whittling away at a piece using a carving knife that seems little more than a pocket knife. After so many years of being lucky enough to work at his passion, McCarthy has only one concern: his hands. “I’m finding it’s getting harder to hold the wood while I carve. Once my wife gets an operation for her hip, it’ll be my turn to have something done about my hand.” Such are the perils of carving for a living.

McCarthy displays works in progress.

In another room, Ron Johansen is leading another demonstration. An enthusiastic speaker with an easy laugh, Johansen is discussing proportion and symmetry in carving birds. Though the topic may sound dry, the talk provides some surprising information. Another artist with decades of experience both in carving and in teaching, he is demonstrating that the basic elements of birds – the proportion of head to beak, head to body, body to hips – are in perfect symmetry, across nearly all species of bird anatomy. By drawing a series of circles on a white board, he shows that all the major parts of the body can be accurately divided into proportionate size using geometrical shapes. Like a jigsaw puzzle, each body part can be created based on the previous measurement. Not only is the information valuable for would-be artists in the room, it reveals the stunning logic in bird evolution. There’s something gratifying and awe-inspiring here: though the size may change, the dimensions always remain the same. Each individual element all contributing to make birds fly, and be able to survive as a species.

Ron Johansen explains symmetry in bird anatomy.

For example, Johansen points out, most species of birds have the same number of wing feathers. There are three sets that comprise a wing, and their numbers are consistent: ten primary (the longest), ten secondary (the coverts, or midsized feathers that help keep the primaries in place), and three tertiary (third) feathers. In the same way a human elbow reaches precisely to the bottom of its ribs, avian anatomy is repetitive. “They are so like human beings it’s scary,” Ron Johansen says.

Back in another demonstration, John Mello confesses to his joking about the seeming simplicity of carving. It is, of course, nowhere near that simple. Even a world class carver like Mello admits that he has a “junk box”, where he stows projects that have somehow not worked out, in hopes of salvaging expensive wood. According to his biography, Mello began carving in 1980. Before that, he practiced taxidermy, which Mello says was instrumental in really understanding the structure of his subjects. For federally protected species like song birds or raptors, Mello borrows study skins from museums, which provide him with the color and feather details he needs. Yet with all his care, there are still mistakes. And since Mello chooses to work in Tupelo Gum, a wood grown in the swamps of Louisiana, mistakes can be very, very costly.

“I was working with a block of wood that cost me about $150. I was going right along with the band saw, following the pattern at the top. But when I stopped, I realized that I’d cut away parts from the bottom that I hadn’t meant to.” The result, Mello says, was that instead of one magnificent bird carving, he had to toss the wood into his junk box, where it would later be divided into about 30 chickadee carvings. “I’ll tell ya, when I realized what I did to that wood, I’m pretty sure you could have heard me yell down the block!”