Friendly Hands

Bless thee in all the work of thy hand which thou doest

—Deuteronomy 14:29

The first thing you noticed about Gino was his hands. They were massive and broad, strong and competent, with fingers so thick that his son can recall a time when, as a young child, he was unable to encompass any one of them with his entire fist. They were hands that knew what they were about and showed not the slightest hesitation as they approached their appointed task. I sometimes imagined them coming to the shop by themselves, fully capable of meeting the day’s challenges without Gino being there.

Gino Masero, one of the thirty-two members of the English Association of Master Carvers, was my teacher, my mentor, and my friend. In addition to teaching me ordinary, everyday skills like carving hair and sharpening tools, he bestowed a much more important gift—he generously opened a window into his soul. And what I saw there, combined with what I learned at his workbench, made it possible for me to become a professional woodcarver.

On the morning that he began my lessons, Gino had me place my short, stubby hands on the workbench, the left palm up, the right palm down. He studied them for a moment and then solemnly told me that I had “carver’s hands.” He pronounced them large enough to comfortably grasp a carving gouge and strong enough to control it. That

was one of the reasons he took me on as a student, he said. “But you won’t become a woodcarver,” he continued in his serious tone, “until the gouges become extensions of your hands. When that moment comes—and you’ll probably not even be aware that it has come—when the carving tool becomes a part of your hand and you forget that you are holding a tool, then you’ll be a woodcarver.”

Gino was right: that moment did eventually come for me—and yet I don’t remember it happening as an event. There was certainly no drum roll or flashing lightbulb. It just seemed part of a natural progression. One day I was guiding the tool through the wood, and the next day the tool seemed to know the way by itself. I belonged to the gouge as much as the gouge belonged to me. In a near-mystical transference, which perhaps only a fellow craftsman can understand, the tool had become me.

After I had crossed that extraordinary threshold and Gino was satisfied that he had properly trained my hands, he then concentrated on a far more difficult task—he went to work on my head.

He set standards, confident now that I had the physical skills to meet them. “And it has to look right no matter where you stand. Don’t be careless with one spot just because it’s on the bottom or in the back. It doesn’t matter if other people won’t notice it; you’ll know it’s not right, and so will your god.”

He wanted me to see what he saw when he looked at a piece of wood. He wanted me to see what Michelangelo, Tilman Riemenschneider, and Grinling Gibbons had seen. Books, museums, and cathedrals became as important a part of my life as the gouges and the sharpening stones. One afternoon, as we were finishing up the day’s work, he gently chided me. “You’re soon going to become a member of a very old family. That means you have a responsibility to learn from those chaps who were here before us. I think it’s time you got to know some of them.”

The next morning, we caught a train to London and visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he stood me in front of Gibbons’s relief masterpiece, e Stoning of St. Stephen.

“See how subtly Gibbons guides the viewer’s eye by carving those diagonal lines. And see how he adds interest to the lines by gently beveling them. He bloody well commands us to look at St. Stephen. The master is dead some three hundred years, but he’s still communicating. Never forget that, Gerry—communicating, that’s what we’re about.”

Gino loved to carve, and he communicated that love to all those who worked with him and even to some who simply watched him. I still remember the day he explained how he felt about his profession and how he graciously used that explanation to welcome me into the carving brotherhood.

“It’s a grand job, isn’t it? You get to do something you love to do and . . .” Here he paused with a look that somehow combined bemusement and bewilderment. “And, they pay you lots of brass to do it.” Then, with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, he looked me full in the face and said, “Gerry, we’re lucky fellows, us carvers, aren’t we?”