Wood Carving-By Cassie

             One of our electives that has become a huge part of  my experience in Morocco is decorative wood carving. Every Thursday a group goes out to a small wood carving factory just outside of Marrakech and learns how to carve wood by hand from the men who are masters and do this for a living. It was been such a unique and wonderful opportunity, and I personally have become so infatuated with the art form that I go out at least two days a week-one week I went out 4 days in a row-about 15 to 20 hours total that week wood carving. I have been working with the same man every time, Larby, who I would say is the best and most experienced carver employed there. Although we have a huge language barrier-he doesn't speak any English and my Arabic lacks basic carpentry vocabulary for some reason-we are able to communicate well by speaking through the wood. This sounds cheesy perhaps, but there's really no other way to put it. I watch his skilled hands intensely and then try to replicate what I see. He guides my hands to teach me what it should feel like. In the beginning it was much harder to communicate, but now that I have spent an inordinate amount of time learning with him I feel as though we have our own wood-based language. This aspect of wood carving in and of itself has been very interesting-learning a difficult handicraft without words. But I feel I have reached a level of proficiency that I can take this back to the US and pursue it at home. It will be challenging without an usted mizean (excellent teacher), or any usted at all, but I am buying tools here and bringing back stencils and inshallah (God willing) I will be able to advance on my own.
               The type of wood carving I'm referring to involves no electronic equipment. You first draw a stencil onto a piece of wood. Then use a small chisel and hit it with another block of wood following the stencil. Then you carve out what you don't want. Then repeat this so as to make all of the lowered parts smooth and even. Then, once the basic design is raised from the wood, you use different blades to plane the wood and smooth it out, rounding it and adding dimension, leaves, scrolls, and generally making it beautiful. This last step is by far the most challenging and takes the most practice. You must do it in in direct motions or it won't be smooth, and if you don't use the right amount of pressure you can accidentally shave off a part of the design you wanted to keep-this is infinitely frustrating after putting many hours into a design, but Larby is also teaching me to smooth over my mistakes.
              I'm proud of how much I've improved at wood carving in a short amount of time, and I love everything about it. It is so relaxing and wonderful to get intimately aquatint with a block of wood and make something beautiful out of nothing, putting all of your focus into making one small curl or leaf look perfect. The fact that I've been exclusively carving on the wonderfully fragrant cedar adds to the bliss, and this will forever be one of my favorite smells. I've always enjoyed industrial arts-I did glass fusing for my senior project-and I am so excited to continue this hobby (and maybe career?) throughout my life.