Recently I was given a fisherman/sea captain figure by two carving friends who thought it looked a little like the Wood Bee Carver by its style of beard. It is one of those tourist souvenir carvings that has been around for years that used a “flat plane” style of carving technique to economically produce a lot of lookalike carvings.
Harley Refsal has been the most notable authority on Flat Plane Carving as a historian, carver and author of Flat Plane Carving projects. Flat Plane carving has its origin in Scandinavia countries and may have influenced such carvers as Emil Janel and Andy Anderson and the anonymous carvers of tourist souvenirs in cottage industry seventy five years ago.
The characteristic long and broad whittling strokes that create a “flat plane” on the surface of a carving create a minimalistic and folk art beauty to this style of carvings. Flat Plane carving offered a quick approach to earlier cottage industry for making repetitious carving strokes in an assembly line fashion to turn out carvings as cheaply as possible for the tourist gift shop trade. Read the rest of this entry »
Ft. Worth Hobo is a second version of Hillsboro Hobo as described in a previous posting under the category of Hobos. He is the second hobo that is beginning to take shape in the last series of the Hillsboro Hobo picture display.
This photographic journey is a visual study of the completion of a second hobo with similar characteristic to Hillsboro Hobo.
