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|title=The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making

|sort=Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making, The

|publisher=Gerald Duckworth & Co

|date=September 2014

|website=http://davidesterly.com/index.html

|video=T1GqM696Clg

|summary=American woodcarver Esterly restored Grinling Gibbons's limewood carvings at Hampton Court Palace after a 1986 fire. Revisiting his diary from that year, he meditates on the role of brain vs. body in the creative process and asks how we can be faithful to history.

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Bouncing between his studio in upstate New York and the sites of various English sojourns, woodcarver David Esterly's seems to be an idyllic existence. Yet it's not all cosy cottages in the snow and watching geese and coyotes when he looks up from his workbench. There is an element of hard-won retreat from the trials of life in this memoir, but at the same time there is an argument for the essential difficulty of the artist's life. 'Carvers are starvers,' a wizened English carver once told him. Certainly there is no great fortune to be won from a profession as obscure as limewood carving, but the rewards outweigh the hard graft for Esterly.

You needn't be a craftsman yourself to enjoy this book, though some interest in the creative process is a good prerequisite. Indeed, this might be one to peruse alongside Matthew B. Crawford's ''The Case for Working with Your Hands''. The black-and-white photographs, showing some of Gibbons's carvings as well as Esterly's own, are a highlight. If I was being uncharitable, I might say the book didn't need to be nearly 300 pages; 200 would do. Still, it's a subtle, meditative work, ideal for savouring a bit at a time.

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