Father and son carve time together
Al Calvin is carving dragons and feathers into the wood of his son’s guitars and mandolins.
His son Mike, for his part, is carving out the opportunity for Al to do so, the opportunity to keep him busy, his mind and imagination engaged.
Bringing Al wood to work on, in the form of musical instruments, is also a way for Mike to shape more togetherness between them, and build up the balance against lost time.
When Mike’s parents divorced long ago, son and father didn’t see as much of each other. But in recent years since Al had open heart surgery and was later diagnosed with vascular dementia, they’ve been in better touch.
Mike takes every chance to bring his new guitar work down from the Mountain to the house where Al lives in east Hamilton, with his new wife Jenny.
“I buy these kits out of Toronto,” says Mike, a musician who started making his own guitars a few years ago.
The results were great, he thought, but he wanted them to look more distinctive. Then it occurred to him. Dad is a woodcarver. But it wasn’t until Mike approached Al about doing carvings on his guitars that the son realized the true scope of his father’s achievement and the abundance of his output.
Al has been on the pages of The Spectator before. Once was back in the 1970s, when he found an old discarded telephone pole and carved it into a magical, phantasmagorical pillar that stood conspicuously at old Grimsby beach.
It looked somewhat like a Haida totem pole, but this was not cultural appropriation. All the symbols were Al’s own, products of his imagination. There were faces and mouths, imaginary animals and a devil-like figure. It was a sensation.
(I don’t think it’s still there. Maybe some observant reader can say what happened to it.)
Al was in the Spec again for designing and carving the crozier for Niagara Anglican Bishop Joe Fricker. It’s a sinuous scroll shaped cluster of wheat and grapes, with Biblical imagery, wrought by hand. No power tools.
And in the early 2000s, Al won a national woodcarving championship in Hamilton, for a piece that combined the imagery of a Celtic cross (a common image in Al’s work) and a fish, elaborately and dynamically worked up.
“I wanted this kind of thing on my guitars,” says Mike. “He just does this out of his head.”
All over Al’s home are his handicraft — a gorgeous whale framed mirror, opulent-looking wooden Celtic crosses, animal figures, gnomes and trolls, ornate frames for dozens of family photos on the walls.
“I use basswood if I can get it,” explains Al. “It’s not hard, but not too soft either, and really hold a shape and looks good.”
He also works in black walnut, English oak, other woods, and occasionally in bronze.
“I’ve been carving so long,” says Al, who was born in St. John, N.B., and always had a gift for drawing. “It (wood carving) was something that I felt fit my class. I’m from working-class people. If you want more permanent you go to stone, but wood’s still fairly permanent” yet not so grandiose.
“When I started carving, I thought I had the cat by the tail.”
Al’s first job for Mike was his beautiful Les Paul-style guitar. Al did some drawings, then took it to the shop. The result: a richly figured blue-green dragon winding around the pickups and bridge saddle. New is a mandolin, with a hand holding a feather.
“It’s something to keep the mind active, occupied,” says Mike.
It seems to be working. His father is sharp and engaged on the subject of the carving.
Al, who worked at Stelco for a time (“I liked to draw the old guys at the steel mill”) and in Penetanguishene, where he did cabinetmaking, says he’ll keep carving as long as Mike keeps producing guitars.
“What else am I going to do?” Al asks rhetorically.
Mike smiles. It’s a deal.