Following the Grain: How I got into wood carving

 

When I was a kid, there was a movie about a boy who carved a small wooden man in a canoe and set it into a mountain stream. It was called, Paddle to the Sea.

The figure traveled all the way to the city, following rivers, lakes, and hidden waterways. I don’t remember every detail of the film, but I remember the feeling. The idea that something made by hand could move through the world on its own, guided by gravity and terrain, not by control.

That image stayed with me.

Years later, when I went to art school, I tried to move in the opposite direction. I wanted discipline. I wanted lineage. I trained myself as a painter, drawn to post-Impressionists and Renaissance masters, and eventually to Michelangelo’s sculpture. I focused on rendering, anatomy, proportion—learning how to see accurately and reproduce what I saw. I worked hard at the craft of art and reached a high level of technical control.

At the same time, something else was happening. I was hiking in nature for the first time in my life. Spending long hours in the mountains. Doing hallucinogens. Letting the edges soften. And I found myself pulled again and again toward work that was rougher, more immediate—natural forms, instinctive marks, the kind of punk-rock energy that refuses polish. People sometimes call it naïve art, though that word never quite fits.

What I struggled with was honesty. How do you let work be simple without pretending to be untrained? How do you avoid faking naïveté once you’ve spent years learning technique? That tension followed me everywhere. In studios. On trails. In my own head. There is a famous Picasso quote that perfectly sums this up: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

One day, walking toward the mountains near an apple orchard in New Paltz, New York, I noticed a piece of wood lying on the side of the road. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t precious. But it stopped me. I picked it up, and something clicked. I started carving.

Not as a project. Not as a statement. Just responding to the material. Following the grain. Letting the form suggest itself instead of imposing an idea onto it. I carved on and off over the years, slowly, quietly. That thread eventually led me to Taos, to totem carving, to all the small objects that come from listening rather than forcing.

Carving did something that drawing and painting never fully did for me. It removed the illusion of control. Wood pushes back. It splits. It resists. It demands attention. You can’t fake your way through it for long. The knife tells the truth.

The other day, walking along the road, I saw another piece of wood. Just sitting there. And instantly I was back in New Paltz, back at that first moment by the orchard. Same feeling in the body. Same quiet excitement. The sense that the material already knows something, and my job is simply to pay attention.

I don’t start with a plan anymore. I don’t need the object to be anything in particular. I’m interested in what the wood reveals, not what I want it to become.

Maybe that’s what stuck with me from that childhood story. Not the carved figure or the canoe, but the idea of release. Make something carefully. Set it into the current. Let the land finish the work.