BastoMastro Morarelli

GLOSSARY

Monoxile = one piece of wood
Carving in the round= carving that is completed in its entirety
Pyrography = art of decorating wood with burn marks
Walking stick shafts = part of the walking stick which follows the handle
Aniline dye = coloring technique with buffer solution
Heartwood = The inner area of a tree trunk or log. The plant, when it has been wounded, it generates a regeneration process creating a darker crust. The material effect is similar to root wood.
Ferrule= it fits on the end of a walking stick, protecting the shaft, and it helps, not to slip, on mountain trails.
Intarsia = composition of colored shaped woods which fit together set in the wood.

CHOOSING THE TYPE OF WOOD CARVING
This is a basic step, and there is no natural place in which plants, shrubs and roots can grow that is unknown for me. My researches range from woods to public parks, from the highway’s sides to dry river beds from old ruins in the countryside to the new building sites in which vegetation has been eradicated. Everything follows, sometimes, a SYSTEM, sometimes the OCCASION.

THE SYSTEM
follows the traditional research of woods which are easily recognisable such as: pear tree- apple tree - plum tree- cherry tree- apricot tree- lemon tree – orange tree and blackthorn. These ones are easily recognizable also in winter because of their structure and the color of the bark. But there are other trees, even more interesting and fascinating for wood carving, which can be distinguished: the boxwood, the laburnum, the holly, the yew and the pyracantha.

THE OCCASION gives the opportunity to find wild essences or roots which present particular distorted shapes or other elements which have grown together with the trunk or the roots like stones, bones..etc. Not to uselessly kill a plant, I usually take out a little piece of bark just to value the wood’s internal consistency: the grain and fibre’s solidity and specific weight. I decide the classification of the essence type after consulting scientific books; the Ceanothus, for example, that only few people know, it is a shrub which grows almost everywhere and it has little purple flowers, similar to wisteria.

Thanks to all my experience now I can understand which diameter, on the head section, a branch must have to coincide with the shaft of a typical walking stick, 3 cm on the average. It is fundamental to know how to calculate the thickness of the barks not to have, at the end, little and flexible shafts that don’t sustain the weight of whoever is going to use them.

For example: the wild pear tree presents a 3/5 mm bark. The cherry-tree 0.5 mm. The boxwood 1 mm. etc..

CENSUS
Sometimes it happens to find young branches with particular shapes and twists, but that need more time to grow and reach the right dimension and structure to support, in these cases I keep a diary in which I report the place ( like a treasure map), the essence type and when to go back to collect it.

PARTICULAR ANNOTATIONS
It is always a stroke of luck when you find some branches subjected to a vine attack which has created a spiral on their trunks. Sometimes thanks to their helicoidal perfection it can be confused with a turner’s work. There are some branches who created the heartwood, to defend themselves, where they have been attacked by the internal and external parasitics, and some barks which have big scars due to hail and other atmospheric agents like thunders. In my reserve, where I keep the woods to carve, I have a Robinia’s root which has grown around a piece of a brick. I found it in Milan, on Stella Mount, near San Siro. It was born among the ruins of the Second World War.

THE THORNY BROOM
The thorny broom is one of the best wood for wood carving. This shrub grows in Sicily and Sardinia and it is part of the maquis shrubland (macchia mediterranea). It has the same characteristics of the common broom: solid grain of the fibre, and grey wood with brown hues; the only difference consists on the thorny branches. In my researches I have verified that only a branch on 4/5 of the plant grows with a specific twisted shape. This structure consists on an ovoid form which repeat itself in a continuous way. Just have a look at the picture. It seems a handmade carving. Considering the rarity and the beauty of this branch I would like collectors and wood carver to give it a special recognition.

WOOD DRYING AND SHAFT SQUARING TECHNIQUES
Wood carvers’ worst enemies are the wood cracks during the drying phase. Books give lots of suggestions but the safest is to consider the periods of the year that coincide with the periods of full moon. But it’s not so easy. Every plant is different from the other. I have tried all types of drying but usually the best way for the plants I carve is this. I remove the bark after 7 days from the cut.

I roll all the shaft and the handle up with a newspaper 3-4 thick. This technique allows wood to lose gradually its moisture without any shock, while the air does the rest, drying both the paper and the wood. To square the shaft, once the wood is seasoned, I use the steam technique, which makes the fibre more elastic, and I use a metal extrusion, L shaped, where I place the shaft and I stretch it pressing it with clamps.

ORNAMENTAL SOLUTIONS FOR DAMAGES PROVOCKED BY PARASITICS AND NATURAL PHENOMENA
Usually the specific shape that a branch can assume, twists, knottinesses, scars, is the result of external natural phenomena or the parasitics. They start a real natural wood carving. To cover woodworms’ erosions I insert some heartwoods in the same plant or some particular knots which they camouflage themselves with the rest of the wood, or some intarsia with ornamental colored drawings: YELLOW= boxwood- BLACK= the laburnum – RED= cherry tree- WHITE =holly.