Harald Lamon Davidson

A HEART FOR WOOD My love for wood and wood carving has always been there, but the path to it was not obvious. As a child, I remember many hours spent tinkering with a pocketknife, saw, hammer and nails to make bows, swords, shields and everything else that was part of my imagination at the time. Later, I started making furniture for my own bedroom. In my adolescence, playing with wood was less normal for my peers and at school it was more important to study hard than be creative. At that time, there was an old stone sharpening wheel in the shed next to the house where we lived. I had no clue about grinding then, but if you pushed wooden sticks against such a wheel, the wood would start to burn and you could make unusual patterns with those black lines. I secretly felt like an inventor and that was great. Once at university, while studying psychology, I again felt the urge to work with wood. I enrolled in a traditional wood carving course. By traditional, I mean wood carving with chisels and gouges in perfectly dried and straight oak planks to make carvings, like the ones you see on confessionals in church. This course was not quite what I was looking for to get creative with wood. Chisels and wood were expensive for a student and a workbench wouldn’t fit in my student room. But I did learn a lot about wood and tools then. Only later did I realize the value of these classes. Later, when I settled down, wood was mainly a material for remodelling and renovation. I learnt to work with machines. Then we moved to a house with a big garden and I tried again to build with branches and be creative with wood. Together with my sons, I finally rediscovered the child in myself and made a two-storey tree house and a 538 sq ft (50 sq m) oak shed in the garden. Writing all of this, it seems obvious that I would be absolutely thrilled when I saw someone making a spoon out of a branch about 12 years ago, using only an axe, a knife and a spoon knife. I finally felt like I knew what to do with wood. It seemed completely right, it almost felt like coming home. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself for the previous 30 years. It started with the first spoon I carved then – and part of the journey I’ve taken since then can be found in this book (called Heart for Wood in the original Dutch edition). For my students, I try to be the teacher I would have liked to find myself in those first years in our small country. I wrote this book with the same question in the back of my mind: what would I have wanted to read ten years ago? Although it never feels like work, being a craftsman is something that never stops, starts or ends. It is a way of life. When I take a bike ride with my wife, she sees all the shops, beautiful houses and cosy streets along the way. I, however, mostly see all the trees and bushes, all the wooden structures, studios and creative, unique constructions. We always see the world from our own perspective. Trees are the common thread in my life and my future is as exciting and multifaceted as the wood I work with every day. It’s not always sunshine and roses, but I am a happy person. Harald