Humbling indeed. Every time I just have to have some new tool (e.g. a LV beading tool, which I may or may not ever use, or the biggest and best Makita router) I try to remind myself of all the indigenous artists and craftsmen who use only rudimentary hand tools.
Around the corner from me is a suburban service station, with some old trees on the property. Years back, one of the trees died. A passing undocumented immigrant from Zimbabwe offered to carve the tree, which he proceeded to do with a couple of axes. He produced a spectacular sculpture of two leopards chasing each other up a tree (the trunk was at just the right slope), and then burnt the well-known leopard spots on the wood. Took a couple of days. The sculpture was a landmark for more than a decade, but the new owners of the service station did not maintain it, and it eventually decayed. I could not find a photo, but attach a photo of a cheetah carved out of a tree-trunk by a local artist. It sits in my examination room. It has lost a couple of teeth through age - who hasn't?
The closest I ever came, was to carve a wooden chain and a block with three balls in it, while I was in the army, posted to Namibia (then South West Africa), in the late 70s. It helped to have a lot of time on hand, healthy troops who did not need doctoring, and some suitable local wood. I still have somewhere a walking stick I carved at the time. I used a Swiss Army knife and a hunting knife, but I was in nowhere the same league as this kid.
Incidentally, he has taken his inspiration from various sources: Uganda is landlocked, but has large fresh-water lakes. The principal fish in the carving is a saltwater shark, the fish in the right upper corner is a coelacanth - a very deep-water fish unchanged since prehistoric times, occasionally caught off our Indian Ocean coast, or off the Seychelles archipelago. Extra pair of fins, predecessor of creatures that first left the oceans to walk on the emerging land mass. The remaining three may be fresh-water fish found in Uganda.
I recently repaired a hand-carved ivory statuette of a fisherman belonging to my sister, from when she lived in Malawi 50 yrs ago. Malawians are great at carving ivory as well as ebony, which is abundant there. I mounted it on a slice of ebony branch, which I had lying around from that time. I also have some ivory carvings, now no longer obtainable due to CITES regulations, which I support, but do not intend to destroy the artwork.
