chip carving of a line of music with birds and flowers

“Note of Longing”: A carving after Conrad Beissel

Eternal apprenticeshipHistorical Miscellany
chip carving of a line of music with birds and flowers
“Note of Longing,” 2026. Chip carving in basswood. For more about my carving visit woodwork.davidwalbert.com.

I’ve long said that any work of art that requires from the outset an accompanying statement to be understood is a poor job of art: if you have a point to make, write an essay. And so I would be content to let the carving above stand on its own. You’ve got music, and flowers, and birds singing—it says love pretty clearly, I hope. (Unless those birds are in fact arguing… it’s hard to tell with birds. Though that might say love just as well. I suppose it depends what they’re arguing about.)

But this carving has roots, and it came about by a fairly complicated process, which may further illuminate it (pun intended).

map of Lawson's route, 1700-01

John Lawson’s explorations, 1700–1701

Historical Miscellany

map of Lawson's route, 1700-01

I created this map for LEARN NC in 2009 to show the approximate route of John Lawson, who explored the Carolinas in 1700–1701 and documented his travels in A New Voyage to Carolina (1709). I had intended the map to accompany a web-based critical edition of Lawson’s book, but I wasn’t able to finish the project.

I drew a new version of this map for The Curious Mister Catesby: A “Truly Ingenious” Naturalist Explores New Worlds, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015.

The manly art of baking

Historical Miscellany

As a guy who bakes a lot, I get sort of tired of seeing baking portrayed as some cutesy thing that mommy bloggers do while their toddlers crawl around the kitchen, licking flour off the flour. Nothing against mommy bloggers, understand. Or toddlers. But sometimes I wish there were a more, you know, manly depiction of baking. Enter the sixteenth-century Swiss artist Jost Ammam, who produced this woodcut for The Book of Trades, a collection of illustrated poems…

screenshot

A brief history of USDA nutritional advice

Historical Miscellany

The USDA has made a big deal the last couple of years about its “healthy plate” model of good eating, which replaces the old food pyramid, which replaced the four food groups, which replaced… well… I thought a chart might help. Today’s post is a visual history of the USDA’s nutritional advice, showing how food groups and recommended servings have changed over the past century.

On the propriety of urinating in the dining room

Historical Miscellany

On the screen the Regency period of Jane Austen’s novels always looks so prim, but in reality it appears not quite to have lived up to our expectations of public-broadcast propriety. Louis Simond, a French-born American who traveled through Britain in 1810–11, some (to his mind) shocking practices of the English aristocracy at table — practices, as he said, “not quite consistent with that scrupulous delicacy on which the English pique themselves.”