| Intarsia ~ The "Wooden" Picture Intarsia (Intär´sçe or tarsia) is the art of creating decorative pictures from hardwoods. History finds intarsia mostly in Italy. The Italian artists would create realistic images of cupboards. The most well known are the intarsia panels made by Fra Giovanni da Verona, constructed around 1520 and can be seen at http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/intarsia.html. The traditional process, involving many long and demanding steps, was both expensive and painstaking. Intarsia eventually became a lost art. Intarsia was revived in America much to the credit of Judy Gale Roberts. Judy was among the first of ten woodworkers and only woman elected to the Wood Magazine Hall of Fame in 1997. The colors in an intarsia art piece come from the natural color, shades and grain of the wood. No paint or stains are used. Each intarsia art form can have 15, 20 to 200 or more pieces of wood, individually cut and shaped to fit tightly to the adjacent pieces. Intarsia is unique because no two art pieces, made from the same pattern, having different shades and grains of wood, are exactly the same. One intarsia art piece is one-of-a-kind. Fretwork From the Wikipedia encyclopedia, fretwork is an interlaced decorative design that is either carved in low relief on a solid background, or cut out with a fretsaw, jigsaw or scrollsaw. Fretwork is cutting out areas that leaves an image in the wood. The cuts can also be made totally outside the design leaving a solid piece. |
