Two old men, radiating contentment… Their trade seemed to have been a refuge for them. Perhaps their serenity came from making things that gave pleasure to others.  Or making things they knew would outlast them, give them a little power over the grave.  Leaving behind physical evidence that they had lived and were creative agents in the world.  Maybe it was that they had spent a lifetime swimming in a sea of harmonious form, that this had osmosed into them, and then as the years went on it began phosphorescing out in a cloud of benign tranquility.  Or was it something in the activity of woodcarving itself that gave them, at last, their moral radiance?

— David Esterly, The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making,   Viking 2012

Also by David Esterly:  Grinling Gibbons & the Art of Carving, V&A 1998