In carving, where the original surface forms the highest relief, and has to be cut back to form the ground, the result would be reversed, the individual worker being more attracted to the treatment of detail than to clearing away uninteresting spaces. Carving, whether in wood or stone, is employed in various decorative positions, and except in the enrichment of friezes or mouldings--when the repeating unit is desirable--the design should be complete in itself.
The treatment should evidence the direct employment of the tool, any attempt to efface or soften will result in loss of character and suggest the plastic effect incidental to modelling.
For convenience, and possibly in the absence of more desirable examples, students are often allowed in their early attempts at carving to reproduce casts of plastic origin. This is undoubtedly pernicious, as the model is probably unsuitable, and the student is thereby biassed. Examples should be selected in which the characteristic treatment is sufficiently evident if a true and thorough appreciation of the craft is to be instilled.
[Illustration: No. 276. Simple Jacobean Wood Carving. Direct gouge work.]
In the design--which may occupy or fill the shape and can be symmetrically arranged on a central axis, or balanced--the effect is due mainly to Light and Shade. Further interest may be imparted by the sectional form or modelling of the details, groovings, striations or other textural suggestions.
The employment of punched grounds in carved work is to be deprecated as mechanical in effect. Sufficient interest is obtainable by the process of cutting back, in the perfect levelling of which the carver need not be too concerned. Suspiciously uniform grounds are suggestive of work fret-sawed and applied.
[Illustration: No. 277. Wood Carving. English. Late Elizabethan or Early Jacobean.]
When carving in wood is in very high relief, it is occasionally, as in the Grinling Gibbons work, built up. This may not be a matter of great objection if properly attached, and the grain of fibre matched, but is, however, better avoided.
Modelled ornament is generally employed in reproduction processes, such as moulding of Terra-cotta, plaster, etc. The design can be free in expression, or a unit of repetition according to requirement.
