Keeping a Welsh Tradition Alive in North America

I love what I do!!     For quite a few years now I have been carving lovespoons professionally and I can say without any doubt whatsoever, it is the best job I've ever had!    Every morning when I glance at the news, I see death, destruction, hate, animosity, greed and corruption oozing from every corner of the globe, yet in my little world I am completely focussed on creating expressions of love and profound caring for clients who love one another.   Every day, my problems are centred on telling stories of love and passion through carved wood.  When my clients are thinking about their lovespoons, they forget about stock market fluctuations, religious wars or any of the other maladies which daily batter them and their fellow global citizens.  They enjoy an opportunity to think beautiful and romantic thoughts while we create an artwork which radiates all that is good about them and their loved ones.   Sure, the money is nothing to write home about (the expression 'Carvers are starvers' didn't come out of thin air) but the satisfaction and the sense of doing something really, really worthwhile in an increasingly negative world makes my career completely worth it!!   Even disastrous breaks and accidents while carving don't seem so bad when I'm carving a lovespoon!

One of the great 'side-effects' of my career as a lovespoon carver has been the opportunity to keep a centuries old tradition alive in North America.   This is the one of the main reasons I am so delighted to carve the annual lovespoon for the West Coast Eisteddfod.   Some traditions are worth keeping and I think that lovespoon carving and the cultural traditions represented by the Eisteddfod are plum examples of those.   However, neither lovespoon carving or staging Eisteddfods are easy to do in our modern, tech oriented society without having a lot of support.   In my case, I am subject to all the vagaries of any business, but in the case of the Eisteddfod, it can only survive and grow with active participation.   Whether you enter some of the competitions, attend the events, donate some funds or simply tell your friends, family and acquaintances about it, I urge you to help keep the Eisteddfod going.   

I have donated my Eisteddfod lovespoon for you to win.  All you have to do is send in a dollar or two (although more is always gladly received!!) and you will be entered for the draw prize.   Each dollar you donate equals one opportunity to win (so if you are Warren Buffet, you could be in with a pretty good chance)!!

So once again, here is a look at the spoon and I hope it will inspire you to hit the donate button!!

Presenting, the 2011 David Western West Coast Eisteddfod Lovespoon!

From Ceri Shaw at AmeriCymru:

Here Be Dragons Mark III

I've been beavering away on the sections of the Americymru spoon which our prize winning design ideas are to fill.   Everything went very well and the front face of the spoon is almost completed!   A bit of tweaking and some judicious shaving here-and-there is all that is required now!

I'm more than pleased with the beautiful grain and colourful figure of the birch used for this year's spoon.  It is gorgeous stuff!!   Like last year's spoon, the carving has gone very well and the wood seems to handle all the various design ideas without getting crumbly or cracking.  I think it will be a lovely spoon when it is done!

I really sweated about carving Laura's Daffodil design...both because we worked together on last year's spoon and I know how elegant and delicate she makes her flowers and because I decided not to fret cut through the design.  Usually Laura's flowers have their surroundings cut away so that they can stand proud without the weight of the background pulling them down.  This year I didn't do that, so there was pressure on me to get the flowers nice and light and not have the background become too obtrusive.  Hopefully, I've done it right and Laura will be happy with it.... otherwise it is back to the drawing board for me!!!   I positioned the Daffs design at the foot of the dragon's body so as to make a symbolic link with the ground.   I also thought the earth makes the right metaphor for growth and that is what our Eisteddfods have been all about over these last 3 years!!

The Harp design came out very well too!   The harp seems nice and full and stands out clearly from the background with the text bringing some action to the big space on the right side of the circle.   I think this design will certainly illustrate the importance of music both to the Eisteddfod and to the Welsh people.  It's location at the Dragon's heart is also critical with the metaphor a simple and fairly obvious one!

The Awen was another design I sweated over a bit.  I was tempted to fret cut it out to really make it bold, but in the end I decided to stay with a very simple and elegant low relief carving.   Because of its ethereal nature, I felt it was ideally suited for the wing area of the dragon as it would have an association with flight and with other-worldliness (is that a word...it is now).

The Dragon's head is nicely set off with this lovely little piece of abalone inlay.  (In case I am about to take a hammering from the environmental crowd for using abalone, I cut this particular piece from an old ashtray I found at the Salvation Army Store a few years back.  It seemed a shame for something so beautiful to be used for that purpose, so I have recycled, using it in dozens of spoons over the years.....besides, I don't even eat seafood!!!)  The figure of the wood perfectly accentuates both the body and the back scales of our dragon and brings some extra zip to the Celtic knotwork....niiiice!!

So there it is so far!   I hope that now you can see it is, indeed, coming along, you will be inspired to donate a few bucks to the Eisteddfod for your chance to win it!!   Someone will be taking it home after the Eisteddfod (and no, you don't have to be present to win) so enter now and enter often!!!

Your donation (whether exceedingly generous or very close to the bone) will be used to make our Eisteddfod better and better!!  Help hoist the Driag Goch amidst the sea of tartan and shamrocks that is Celtic North America!!!

Good things DO happen in threes!

Well after the downer tone of my recent blog, I am happy to say that all is well again in the lovespoon world and that good things have happened in threes....which makes a very welcome change from the usual 'bad things in threes' that seem so much more common.

First, I am delighted to say that the unpaid lovespoon situation has been happily resolved! The cheque has arrived, my 100% record is back on track and my faith in humanity has been restored! So although the situation definitely had some down moments, in the end it has all worked out.

Next, I am thrilled that my "Legend of Taliesin" lovespoon is now on display at the National History Museum of Wales at St Fagans near Cardiff. For me it is an absolute thrill to have a piece of my art on display in the very institution which inspired my passion many, many, many years ago! St Fagans, as it is more commonly known, is a true gem in the Welsh crown and is a world class museum of history and culture. Their collection of historical lovespoons is unrivalled and I feel very honoured to have my work be a small part of it. I also want to congratulate fellow carvers Mike Davies and Sion Llewellyn whose spoons are also on display!

Finally, my book publisher, Fox Chapel Publishing, have generously offered three copies of my book to the eventual winners of our upcoming Left Coast Eisteddfod "Help design the lovespoon" competition!! This year we will be soliciting help to design the lovespoon which we use as a draw prize incentive to help raise funds in support of our event!

This year we want YOU, yes, YOU, to help us design the 2011 West Coast Eisteddfod lovespoon.  As you can see on this year's spoon sketch, below, three circular spaces have been left blank and it is our hope that they will be filled in by supporters of our Eisteddfod.

We welcome Americymru members, Welsh society members, school kids, enthusiastic artists and poets, lovespoon carver wannabies, people who have no connection to Wales at all but wouldn't mind having their idea included on our lovespoon... in short, anyone who wants to have a bash at it!! Enter one, two, three or more ideas, we're open to anything and everything! Not an artist? No big deal. Write a very brief poem (but keep in mind, these circles are only 2 inches in diameter, so I can't fit a sonnet in there!!) make a collage, write a description of your idea, like I said, we're game for anything!! 

Really keen artists among you may have noticed that the circles are placed at the dragon's heart, wings and feet, so there's some more idea fodder!! 

We'll be releasing full contest details very soon, but in the meantime, let your design imaginations run wild!

2011 West Coast Eisteddfod

The 2011 West Coast Eisteddfod is gearing up now and it's time for another spoon! An announcement of this year's spoon will be made here shortly.

This year's West Coast Eisteddfod will be held in Los Angeles, California in parntership with Lorin Morgan-Richards of A Raven Above Press and announcements who will be performing and what other activities will take place will be made on the events page there and on AmeriCymru as they're added.

To support the event and help bring Welsh art and artists to Los Angeles, click on the donation button in the right-hand column and make a donation or buy some tickets to win this year's spooon, or for the next month you can contribute to the event kickstart campaign.

Here's this year's event poster and you can download it if you like.

Watch this space for a new spoon announcement soon!

I'm very excited to be working on another lovespoon for the Left Coast Eisteddfod!

I'm very excited to be working on another lovespoon for the Left Coast Eisteddfod! After the success of last year's spoon and the enthusiastic response it generated for the Left Coast Eisteddfod, we decided to make it an annual event.

This time, though, I wanted to try something a bit different. I'll be designing and carving this lovespoon in concert with Ohio lovespoon carver, Laura Gorun, so it will very much be a joint effort! Laura is relatively new to lovespoon carving, but her spoons have the sophisticated design and elegant craftsmanship of someone who has been at it for much longer!! I'm certain that working with her is going to yield a really marvelous lovespoon!

Although we will be separated by many thousands of miles and have only ever met through the internet, we plan to design the spoon via lots of back-and-forth emails, taking advantage of the incredible opportunities for collaboration the electronic age has opened up.

Our 'theme' for the lovespoon will be "2." As it is the second year of the Eisteddfod, the number 2 seemed a good jumping off point for the design. We also thought that with one of us being male and the other female, one of us fairly new to carving, one an 'oldtimer' and with us living in two different countries, 2 seemed to crop up everywhere. The challenge now will be for us to work that into a viable design!!

When it comes time to carve the lovespoon, we will carve half the spoon each. Like all carvers, we each have elements that we are good at and some that we are not quite as comfortable with, so we will attempt to divvy up the carving so that we each work as much as possible to our strongest suit.

This will be a unique experiment for both of us, especially given that lovespoon carving is generally a pretty solitary endeavour. For both of us, working with another set of ideas and attitutes toward lovespoon carving will both open design doors and create some challenges!

The plan is to work up the design over the next couple of weeks and then begin the carving process. This blog will illustrate what we have been getting up to and will show the whole process from initial rough ideas to the finished piece. Both Laura and I hope that you will enjoy following along and that you will be inspired to donate to the Left Coast Eisteddfod for your chance to win the completed lovespoon!!

Next week we'll post the first set of drawings and then the hard stuff starts!

In the meantime, we hope you will visit us at:

www.BlakesPA.com to view Laura's handmade lovespoons

and

www.davidwesternlovespoons.com to view David's work

The Spoon at The Halfway Point

I've neared the half-way point carving the front of the Left Coast Eisteddfod lovespoon. The bowls are shaped, the vines have been formed and the leaf/star section is more-or-less complete. I'm now going to move into the Celtic knotwork section which the dragon surrounds. I just realized that the pictures in the last few blogs have all been close-ups, so I think it is a good idea to include a picture of the whole spoon to show where I'm at with it.

As you can see, having the paper pattern glued directly to the workpiece makes life so much easier than messing around with pencil lines or carbon paper tracings. Although paper can be a bit hard on the tool sharpness, I find that the odd extra trip to the sharpening bench is a small price to pay for the convenience of being able to clearly see the design as I work!

So, onto the Celtic knotwork. Once the knotwork has been sawn to rough shape (which can be a long and tedious process in itself) the actual carving is not particularly difficult. What can be a problem though is getting the overs and unders wrong and messing up the flow of the knots. To overcome the possibility of an error at this stage, I make shallow cuts which barely define the knot pattern, but leave me plenty of material should I need to reverse a section. Believe me, there is nothing more annoying, frustrating and embarassing than getting to the end of the knot and discovering there are two overs or two unders in a row. If I've cut them too deep, I'm up the creek and you can guess what kind of creek it is!

This picture shows me using a small chisel to cut a straight groove of aproximately 1/16th of an inch depth where the one section of knot passes over the other.

As before, I resist the urge to cut too deep too quickly. I then use the same chisel to cut away a small wedge-shaped slice which creates a little ramp down to the bottom of my first chisel cut. If all goes well, a little chip pops out and my cuts meet at the same lowest point.

Again, getting carried away and cutting too deep at this point of the game can have dire consequences later.

Once I have repeated this procedure throughout the entire knot and am satisfied that everything is in order with the overs and unders, I commit to deeper cuts which bring the knot to vibrant life!

Next week, I'll show how to clean up the knots and get them looking nice and smart. In the meantime, I hope you will help support the Left Coast Eisteddfod's inaugural year by donating a few dollars. Each dollar you donate will give you a chance to win this spoon but even better than that, you'll be proud to know you were right there on the ground floor, helping to build a really worthwhile cultural event!

To donate, simply click on the box next to this blog, its easy, safe and spiritually fulfilling!

David on the cover of the Lee Valley Catalog

Two of David's beautiful spoons are on the cover of the January 2009 Lee Valley Catalog. Lee Valley is "a family-owned business that has been serving users of woodworking and gardening tools since 1978," it is the largest catalog of home and garden items in David's native Canada and is also available in the USA. David's Fine Art of Lovespoons is available in the catalog. David is very happy to be on their cover, he said that this was a goal of his and that he is, "very, very thrilled to be on there!"

Image © 2009 by Lee Valley Tools Ltd. and Veritas®Tools Inc. All rights reserved.