The scent of the sawdust, the smoothness of cleanly sliced surfaces, the heft of the mallet, the satisfaction of seeing the imagined object appear under one's hands, even the bloody calluses—the altogether sensuous nature of carving reawakened PJ's childhood love for wood, and for the trees from which wood is gleaned. Carving, not so different from throwing pots or sculpting clay, though the planned diminutions of carving a block of wood—when it's gone, it's gone—might seem opposite to the flexible additions of clay modelling. Each may please the eye, yet both are most fundamentally tactile processes. Works in wood excite the desire to touch, to make contact with the ur-texture of art. Aesthetically, the same debate often flares in the carving workshop as in the clay studio: Utilitarian object or Art objet?
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