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greenland gibbons was a woodcarver
working in the baroque period
he's got work all over england in most
of the stately homes
just kind of stunning collections of
instruments and birds and garlands
but you because he is so famous in the
woodcarving world it is the kind of
aspirational pinnacle of where you want
to get to as a woodcarver in a lot of
ways so he's uh
dawn of the wood carving world so this
is one of greenland gibbon's most famous
pieces
and it's a cravatch which was owned by
horace walpole
and was actually worn to a party and
fooled some of his guests
into thinking it was real so that gives
you an idea of just how realistic it
looks and it's a
very fine carvings of venetian lace
underneath a
bow at the top i'll be working from a
combination of
photographs i've taken of the original
when i went to visit the vna and they've
also taken a 3d
scan of it and created the 3d print
which gives me the outline and
some of the kind of forms and details
the 3d print works
very similarly to the models that
carvers would have used in
in the past so often if you're making a
complicated carving you'll create a clay
model and you might cast that in plaster
and you'll be working
to replicate that in the wood and the 3d
print
acts as an excellent stand-in for that
be taking measurements to find the high
points and then translating that into
the wood and you gradually find
points across the carving and you'll cut
down
to those and gradually refine the
surface
bit by bit brinley gibbons almost
exclusively used line wood
and you can see in his work particularly
exactly how fine you can get
carved lace work from it you can carve
your strings of instruments
so it it allows you to get that that
real precision in the carving
it's a sort of fact-finding stage i'm
taking lots of measurements from the
model
transposing them to the wood carving
it's mainly a lot of measuring a lot of
finding where things are and getting
them in the right place so that when
you're adding all the detail that's
going to
sit over a really nice form it's a stage
i enjoy least i think because it's
it's so important to get right high
stakes for
messing something up chisels are quite
varied there'll be
gouges you get spoon bank gouges back
bent spoon gouges
fishtail gouges so there's a quite
a variety of names and little v tools as
well
sometimes the first process would be
called roughing out or blocking out
where you're you're getting in the main
shapes and the main kind of heights and
it is
it is a rough and blocky process which
gives rise to the name
and sometimes people call it stabbing
out which is
when you're really outlining the cuts
with with the edge of your chisel to
define the shapes you're going to make
gradually refine the surface bit by bit
when you have those locked in you'll cut
in some of the details and the finer
bits
i'm going to get as much done as i can
do in within two weeks
i suspect he would have been much
quicker
so first i found the curve profile over
the the whole object and then it was a
matter of finding the measurements
and outlining the edges of them and then
taking taking cuts in either side
and um taking a shallow-ish gouge and
coming in to
cut out the bottom and you can see in
the model of the carving that uh
grindling gibbons has
has done these really kind of decisive
cuts very efficient way of working
it was it was really nice looking at
that because it looked initially like
the cuts would have been hollowed out by
a kind of steep sided eight or nine
sweep gouge
and it's uh it's really nice to see that
he's taken these quite decisive cuts and
other ways you can see he's sped the
process up uh without
sacrificing any of the quality
a lot of wood carving is uh done without
a mallet so
you're just using the pressure of your
hands to move the chisel through the
wood and that gives you more control
particularly when you're
undercutting and it's got very delicate
replicating something somebody's done
especially when it's hundreds of years
ago because you
are still using the same chisels you're
using the same tools and as you're
working on it you can see the decisions
they've made to
how how they've worked how they've
worked particular problems out where
they've
where they've slipped and the the chisel
is cut a little bit deeper or
they've had to change things and you're
quite literally following
sometimes the same kind of cuts which is
a really interesting way of getting to
know
how that person was thinking or how they
were approaching a job
i've used a little gouge to make these
c-shaped or u-shaped marks that
uh run sideways that gibbons used in a
lot of places over this and
i've used some flat chisels to take out
the little v-cuts
either side of the punch work which is
another detail that he did a lot of
and little gouges the same little gouge
i've used for
the u-shaped cuts to give texture i've
also been using to give the
the shape of the material and stitching
over these these nice round stitched
areas raised areas
the chisels have stayed relatively
similar between now and when he was
working i think
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so now i'm going to be using a small v
chisel just to put
the line detail lines in these strap
work pieces that connect the larger
kind of floral areas
it's nice to be able to learn from a
master of woodcarving even though we're
still
300 years apart
you get to know the object really well
as well cause you spend days looking at
it and measuring it and you you just you
end up
seeing and noticing more about it than
you that you would
any of every time otherwise because if
you go to a gallery you're not likely to
spend more than
20 minutes looking at something but this
you you know you really get
get to know it
you come up closer again you can see the
the way he stylized the lace work
and that's where all the magic happens i
think
it's taking something that looks
realistic from when you're not examining
it closely and then you realize that
he's done these things that make it
makes them seem more realistic than if
they were exact copies of life
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you