Introduction:
A Life of Carving
“Everything you do in life is cumulative.” While teaching art to high school students, I heard these sage words of advice from the wife of a fellow teacher. How true they have been in my journey through the past forty-plus years. I would have never imagined that I would be carving wood since 1985 as a vocation.
In high school and college, many of my art instructors praised me for my efforts but always suggested that my level of talent wasn’t up to par with many of my fellow art majors. Each time, the message stung, but it also served as motivation to improve. Upon graduating college, my first job was teaching high school students art. Many of the students weren’t interested and couldn’t see any practical application for art. I noticed many of the boys had pliers and pocketknives on their belts. It was the late 1970s, and this was ranch country. To attempt to capture their interest, we did lead casting with scrap materials from the local automotive garage. We also picked up scraps of wood and end pieces from the lumberyard. I learned to carve wood right along with the kids.
A few years later, my husband, Bernie, and I had our first and only child, and I left my teaching career to stay at home more with our son. Wanting to help supplement his teaching income, we set the objective to have my art business earn $100 per month. At the time, I was doing T-shirt designs, greeting card designs, and even coaching junior high volleyball. There were months when that $100 goal wasn’t met.
But I continued to carve, and one day I saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a carving show in nearby Omaha, NE. We attended, and my work was viewed favorably. I still remember selling three pieces at that show, one of a raccoon and two others that were Christmas ornaments, for a grand total of $106. We still wonder how we came to price those carvings—the raccoon was sold for $92 dollars and the ornaments for $7 each. I’m quite sure that the time we spent traveling, the show fee, and the other incidentals weren’t covered by what we earned at the show. But it did give me confidence.
This show gave us connections to other shows in Wichita, KS, and Kansas City, MO, and from there things just kind of mushroomed. One of the most important lessons I learned during this time was the value of show participation and viewing each show with equal importance. Many times I’ve heard a show referred to as a “big show” or “small show” or “important show.” But we always believed they were all of equal importance. We were putting our work out for new people to see in different locales, and we understood that to the carving group that was hosting the show, this was their most important show of the year.
After winning some awards and selling my work at the Wichita and Kansas City shows, I set some new goals with my husband: to be recognized nationally in the medium within three years, and to be internationally recognized within five years. I enlisted my husband’s assistance in doing some of the woodburning, sanding, and finishing bases, as well as handling the business side of carving.
In 1989, my husband took a year’s leave of absence from teaching to work with me full time and see if we could make a living if both of us were carving full time. Things went well, and although he continued to teach until 1995, we knew we had found a lifestyle.
Over the years, we have taken a lot of chances through the business. Some have worked; many haven’t. I remember being recruited to attend a log cabin show in California. The person selling spaces was a good salesperson. When I said, “People aren’t going to a log cabin show to buy artwork,” her response was, “While the husband is cutting the deal on the home, the wife is looking for furnishings. And your wood will fit the décor.” I hate to admit that in this case, my being right cost me a lot of money: people didn’t come to buy my artwork. At another time, we received a letter from a company in California wanting to reproduce my pieces and sell resin castings at gift shops throughout North America. The only reason we responded was because their telephone number, listed at the bottom of the letter, was an 800 number. It turned out to be a very successful venture: they sold over 93,000 of the reproductions. I imagine we’ve had far more failures in our business than successes. But never once did failure keep us from moving ahead.
Taking these chances came with doing some things that I wasn’t comfortable with. I have absolutely no sense of direction, and in the early years of flying to teach seminars and do shows, I was scared to death going through the airports in large cities. We were fortunate that during these earlier years, and while my husband was still an educator, his parents would come up to take care of our young son, and his father would drive me to and from the airports of departure in Nebraska. I was also fortunate that the vast majority of the people that let me stay with them while teaching seminars were wonderful people. Sadly, a great many have passed, but they were some of the finest people we’d met.
My hope is that through all these years, I have been a positive role model as well as an ambassador to spread the word of carving, not only to carvers and carving groups but at the fine art and sculpture shows we’ve attended as well. I’ve tried to present what I do as not only a craft but an art form.
It’s been a wonderful experience, and I can truly say that all I’ve learned and shared through carving has been cumulative. I thank each and every one of you for your support through the years and wish you joy and happiness in all your carving experiences. I hope your journey is as wonderful as mine has been.
One final thought. One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, “How long does it take to do a carving?” After much consideration, my answer to that question is obvious: “A lifetime.”
Desiree Hajny
Getting Started
This is not a beginner carving, woodburning, or painting book, so it won’t teach you the very basics; it assumes you already have some knowledge of basic tools and techniques and a little bit of practice under your belt. That said, in this section, you’ll review all the key stages of creating the carvings in this book: researching, choosing the right tools and materials, carving, texturing, woodburning, and, of course, painting.
Researching
As I have become older, it has become more apparent to me that those people that are very successful in whatever they do are excited about what they are doing. Their enthusiasm carries over to their endeavors. I believe that your enthusiasm is vital in attempting to carve a piece that will not only be significant to you but also to the others that are viewing your work.
Your research becomes just as important a factor in the overall process of the piece you are working on as the physical techniques of the carving, texturing, woodburning, painting, and finishing are. A carving that has flaws in its overall presentation because of a lack of research will never be as effective as one that has been thoroughly thought about and in which the nuances and intricacies of the particular subject are brought forth accurately.
This raises the question of artistic license—can’t we, as artists, do what we want with our subjects? My personal interpretation of artistic license is that you must know your subject thoroughly and apply this knowledge