The Lost Carving
A Journey to the Heart of Making
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
“A beautiful, intricate meditation on creativity and discovery, on fire and rebirth.” —Elizabeth Gilbert
Awestruck at the sight of a Grinling Gibbons carving in a London church, David Esterly chose to dedicate his life to woodcarving—its physical rhythms, intricate beauty, and intellectual demands. Forty years later, he is the foremost practitioner of Gibbons’s forgotten technique, which revolutionized ornamental sculpture in the late 1600s with its spectacular cascades of flowers, fruits, and foliage.
After a disastrous fire at Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace, Esterly was asked to replace the Gibbons masterpiece destroyed by the flames. It turned out to be the most challenging year in Esterly’s life, forcing him to question his abilities and delve deeply into what it means to make a thing well. Written with a philosopher’s intellect and a poet’s grace, The Lost Carving explores the connection between creativity and physical work and illuminates the passionate pursuit of a vocation that unites head and hand and heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1986, a fire at Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace damaged and destroyed countless woodcarvings by the 17th-century master Grinling Gibbons. The job of reconstructing the lost artwork fell to a small group of historians and artisans, including Esterly, one of the few woodcarvers in the world carving in the same fashion that Gibbons once did. Tracking the ups and downs of the project while contemplating the nature of art, rediscovering the intricacies of his chosen discipline, and exploring the process of creating, Esterly (Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving) has created a work that is part philosophic memoir and part treatise on true craftsmanship. A former poetry scholar, Esterly's prose is enlivened by quotations from Yeats and Shakespeare, and often his words take on the imagery and rhythm of verse ("Then I'll go back and open the drawer, put my hand in the stream, and lift out those days"). There are some interesting subplots as Esterly battles British bureaucracy that opposes his ideas for a Gibbons exhibition and tries to convince others that Gibbons's work should be shown in its natural, uncolored state, but it is Esterly's personal battle to live up to Gibbons's work and aura that is at the heart of this work. As intricate as his carvings, Esterly has shaped a story that captures the effort and uncertainty that lies behind the creation of art and beauty.
