I first met Josef Bartoš on a Tuesday in late November, in a workshop that smelled of limewood and linseed oil. He was seventy-three then, hunched over a half-formed Kašpárek — the trickster who has appeared in Czech puppet theater since the eighteenth century. His hands moved with the steady precision of a man who had performed this same gesture fifty thousand times, shaving curls of pale wood from a jawline that would never quite smile.
The Grammar of Grain
What Bartoš understood, and what most modern craftspeople have forgotten, is that wood has a grammar. Each piece of limewood tells you what it wants to become — the grain suggests a gesture, a bend of the knee, a tilt of the head.