As well an an experiment, this was also a deliberate exercise in self-criticism. Any artist in order to develop, needs to know what works and what doesn't. It's also important to have critiques from peers and teachers, of course, but it's more important for an artist to develop his or her own critical eye.
I had had a boxwood blank hanging around for about a year, so as I wanted to experiment with incised work and
sunken relief, I produced this netsuke of a Boshi pear; dimensions - 32 x 26 x 9mm. Boxwood:
The image is roughly lifesize in the first photo, slightly larger in the following ones, boxwood, showing both
undercutting and incising techniques. I'm not very pleased with it. It shouldn't have been done on wood, though, as an experiment, and having practised the techniques on scraps of wood, I wanted to see what happened. It's impossible to use veiners or gouges on something so small, so I used knives, straight and curved, and gravers. It meant that the incised lines were not true, as I have no engraving skills. Also, when working on a busy bit (eg., where the pear joins the twig/leaves), there's a tendency to overwork and mush the grain ends, so the line becomes fuzzy. The incising was better on the back where I used sewing needles mounted in cork. Lesson learned.
The design, I think, is top heavy, though it didn't seem so in my drawings/sketches, and too squarely aligned. The first is due a bit to the heavy incision lines of the leaves and twig; the second is due to my eye being out when I transferred the drawing of the piece to wood. The contour of the leaf at the side seems a little square and cornered where it should be rounded. I should also have put my initial on the side and made the leaf on the back differently. Again, lesson learned.
I quite like the undercut pear and if I do something like this in wood again, I might stick with that technique and not bother with fine incision work except with needles.
So, really, this is an experimental clunker. It's certainly not saleable by my lights. I put it up so people can see what an, in parts, poorly executed netsuke looks like.
