The idea of "Cellular Fiddles" has evolved out of two earlier projects. The Dimpled Viola made a feature of some of the visually interesting rough carving of a violin that normally get lost in the finished instrument. The Turtle Fiddle which took one of the visual...
Turtle Fiddle
This is a follow up to the Dimpled Viola project and develops some of the ideas sparked by that project. With the viola I made an instrument that made a feature of the gouge work that appears in early stages of carving an instrument but that normally gets completely...
Dimpled Viola, an Etude. Part 2, Finishing
In the first part of this study I constructed a viola emphasizing a part of the construction process, the carving, which is visually very interesting but that most players never get to see. In this second part, I consider the surface finish and explore the decorative...
My father’s wood carving
My father was a sculptor who worked in everything from marble and bronze to sintered sand and telegraph poles. in some of his wood carving he used similar techniques to some that I've ended up using in violin making. Whereas I would be obliged to lose all traces of...
Shōki’s Scroll – Finding other sources of inspiration for violinmaking
I was at the Oberlin violinmakers workshop again this summer, sharing workbenches and ideas with sixty five talanted makers from around the world. With advances in measurement technologies and through a culture of free sharing of ideas and information, some gifted and...