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.

Carving a Spoon and the Importance of Listening

Spoon carving has taught me a lot about balance—specifically, the balance between direction and intent.

When you decide to carve a spoon, certain things are non-negotiable. It needs a cavity. It has to fit comfortably in the mouth. It has to feel good in the hand. It needs to be light enough to use, not clunky or awkward. In that sense, form really does follow function. There are clear outcomes that have to be met.

But within those constraints, there’s another force at work: the wood itself.

Most of the time, I don’t get to choose the “ideal” carving wood. I work with what I have access to. Right now, that’s Siberian elm, a beautiful but stubborn wood that doesn’t shave easily and doesn’t forgive mistakes. It doesn’t like symmetry. It doesn’t like being forced. Because of that, I have to compromise my original vision. I have to let go of perfection. The grain, the knots, the tension in the fibers all start to dictate the direction.

The wood tells you how it wants to be carved, if you’re willing to listen.

That’s one reason I don’t always connect with highly detailed carvings made from very soft, cooperative woods. They can be impressive, even technically masterful, but when the material is so malleable that you can impose anything onto it, something gets lost. My preference is to work in collaboration with the material, not domination over it. I like hearing what the wood has to say.

What’s interesting is how closely this mirrors the way I like working with people—especially kids.

I don’t believe in dictating outcomes or forcing people into a shape that fits my idea of success. I prefer guidance over control. Structure with flexibility. Listening over imposing. This feels especially important to me as a non-Native person working with Native American children, given the history of boarding schools and the horrific attempts to erase culture by making children “malleable.” That history matters. It demands a different approach.

There are still goals. There are still outcomes. But they come second to agency. The kids guide the process more than we often allow in institutional settings. Just like the wood, they aren’t raw material to be shaped; they’re active participants in becoming.

Spoon carving reinforces that lesson every time I pick up a knife.

I love carving spoons because they’re functional. They aren’t abstract objects. They have a purpose and a set of criteria they must meet. And yet, within those limits, there’s infinite variation. A handmade eating spoon carries character. You feel it while carving: the feedback between your hands, the blade, and the grain. Every small decision matters.

That’s very different from a mass-produced spoon. Whether it’s metal or wood, machine-made utensils are dictated, repeatable, and anonymous. They work, but they don’t speak.

As we move deeper into an era of AI, CNC machines, and automated design, that distinction matters to me. Spoon carving is a moment-to-moment conversation. It requires attention, humility, and responsiveness. You adjust constantly. You listen. You make thousands of tiny decisions based on feel, resistance, and feedback.

At least for now, that kind of listening still belongs to human hands.

And maybe that’s the deeper wisdom of spoon carving, not just making something useful, but practicing how to pay attention, how to compromise without giving up purpose, and how to work with the world instead of trying to overwrite it.