French market vocabulary· French
Taille directe
In English use: Direct unmodeled carving
Direct unmodeled carving — straight from the wood block, no clay or wax preparatory model, no second chance.
The traditional African woodcarver almost never works from a prepared model in clay, wax, or plaster, as the European academic tradition demanded. The work is liberated directly, instinctively, and irreversibly from the hard block of wood.
Taille directe allows no error — it requires absolute conceptual clarity in the carver's mind, because a too-deep stroke of the herminette cannot be corrected by adding material back. The radical resoluteness of African sculpture, its compositional strength and clarity, is the direct result.