Wood Carving in Guatemala
Authentic, hand-carved wooden furniture is scattered throughout Guatemala and the culture for wood carving is most certainly thriving in La Antigua. The fine art was featured in the June issue of Revue magazine:
Artistry in Wood
By Ira Lewis
Guatemala is fortunate to have a long, rich history of artisan/artists working in many media going back to pre-Colonial times. Most of the ancient sculpted art is seen as carved stone. However, some of the less-durable carvings in wood from this era still survive.
We are fortunate that in this plastic, machine-made age, artists in Guatemala still can take a chunk of wood and a few, frequently simple, hand tools and produce items that have to be called art. True, much of the work seen is in the Naïve or Folk Art genre, and some of the offerings are crude souvenirs, but look around and you will find an unusual amount of well carved, beautifully designed pieces that are truly art.
Much of the carved wood items are reproductions from colonial times, ranging from the beautifully executed saints and cherubs with china-doll faces and glass eyes to primitive renderings of these same saints. Furniture, shutters, doors, lintels, kitchen utensils, bowls and other useful articles were frequently decorated with carving. Slingshots (hondas) were not just a forked stick with rubber bands to launch a smooth stone but were carved into fanciful images to suit the owner’s imagination or to bring luck and sure shots.
Read the entire article by clicking here: Artistry in Wood
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