Carving out a name
Woodcarver’s trade born of traditionBy DAN FELDNER, Staff Writer, dfeldner@minotdailynews.com
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Wood carving is a proud Scandinavian tradition, a tradition that is deeply entrenched in not only Becky Lusk's Norwegian heritage, but her family as well.
Lusk has been carving since she was 14, and learned the trade from her grandfather.
"My grandfather was a carver. He came from Norway when he was 19, and he carved mostly figures and some acanthus (a floral style). And just growing up around him, I was always interested in carving," Lusk said. "I mean, that was the coolest thing to go down to his workshop and see what he was working on."
After seeing her interest in carving, Lusk's parents bought her some tools and she began to hone her own carving skills.
This is the third year at Hstfest for Lusk, who lives in Coon Valley, Wis. On Thursday, she was carving a dragon-style pattern into a piece of basswood that can be used to decorate an arched doorway. Dragon style is an old type of carving that has a long history in Norway.
"This type of motif was found on Viking ships and on ... churches," Lusk said. "This is the earliest form of Norwegian wood carving."
Lusk says the toughest part of dragon style is drawing the pattern. There are many intricate parts where the pattern overlaps itself and curves around that must be drawn precisely to look good. Once Lusk has the pattern transferred from paper to the wood, carving it out is the fun and easy part.
"The carving's fun. The drawing, that's when you're sweating it out to get it just right," she said.
Lusk also does many other types of carving. Like her grandfather, she also does acanthus. Lusk says acanthus is based on a plant from Italy and the Mediterranean area, and became popular after dragon style lost favor because of its religious ties.
"Once (Norway) switched to Christianity, the dragon style went out of favor because it's just pagan worship," she said. "So this went out and acanthus came in."
Carved figures and ale bowls are a few of the other items Lusk produces. The ale bowls have figures such as the heads of birds, horses and dragons to decorate them.
"Those were used probably in the Middle Ages to drink ale out of," she said. "They drank a lot of ale in Norway, so they made pretty elaborate drinking vessels."
It can take Lusk as little as three hours to carve a small ale bowl and much as six to eight hours to carve a larger one.
Lusk's husband makes wooden flatwork such as fireplace screens. To make sure they both have a steady supply of material, they dry their own wood in 8-foot blocks.
To begin an ale bowl, Lusk cuts a chunk off of one of the blocks and draws a design on it. She then uses a band saw to cut out a rough form, including along the neck of the animal head that will decorate the bowl. She then takes some wood out of the center of the bowl with a drill bit so there isn't quite so much to carve by hand. After that she carves the rest of the bowl out using hand tools.
Lusk also teaches the art of carving to others. She said teaching others how to carve has actually taught her more about fixing mistakes than all her years of experience in the wood shop. She said her fixing skills were put to a stern test in the very first class she taught, which was on figure carving.
"We were putting the eyes in and this man who couldn't see very well, you know, put an eye right in the middle of the forehead. And it's like, 'Oh, can you fix that?' And I'm like, 'Oh, I don't know,'" Lusk said with a laugh. "But you had to learn really fast how to fix mistakes. So I've learned a lot on how to fix mistakes by teaching classes, and that's come in very handy for my own self, too, you know? If I make a mistake it's not a big deal. You just change something around, carve a little deeper."
Since Lusk's job is what most people do for a hobby, she has had to find other things to get her out of the woodshop. Besides reading, she is also learning how to play the fiddle Appalachian style.
"But I have carpal tunnel (syndrome), so I can't play too long because my hands go numb, but I have fun," she said.
Lusk says it was the long hours of carving that gave her carpal tunnel in the first place. This is why boredom with doing the same style over and over isn't the only reason she switches from ale bowls to dragon style to figures and so forth. Switching between the different styles keeps her hands from doing the exact same motions all the time, which has helped with her soreness.
As for what her customers prefer, Lusk says ale bowls with the decorative heads are always popular because so few people do them, as are the dragon-style carvings.
Lusk even gets the chance to collaborate on pieces with her family from time to time. She says they make a raffle piece for the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, every year. After a wooden piece is started, Lusk does the carving and then passes it to her mother for rosemaling. The piece is then raffled off for a fundraiser.
From her grandfather to her mother to Lusk herself, Norwegian artistry is truly a family tradition.
