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With Robert Laurent and William Zorach, direct carving enters into the story of modern sculpture in the United States. Direct carving — in which the sculptors themselves carve stone or wood with mallet and chisel — must be recognized as something more than just a technique. Implicit in it is an aesthetic principle as well that the medium has certain qualities of beauty and expressiveness with which sculptors must bring their own aesthetic sensibilities into harmony. For example, sometimes the shape or veining in a piece of stone or wood suggests, perhaps even dictates, not only the ultimate form, but even the subject matter.

The technique of direct carving was a break with the nineteenth-century tradition in  which the making of a clay model was considered the creative act and the work was then turned over to studio assistants to be cast in plaster or bronze or carved in marble.

Neoclassical sculptors seldom held a mallet or chisel in their own hands, readily conceding that the assistants they employed were far better than they were at carving the finished marble.

 With the turn-of-the-century Crafts movement and the discovery of nontraditional sources of inspiration, such as wooden African figures and masks, there arose a new urge for hands-on, personal execution of art and an interaction with the medium. Even as early as the 1880's and 1890's, nonconformist European artists were attempting direct carving. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Americans — Laurent  and Zorach most notably — had adopted it as their primary means of working.

Born in France, Robert Laurent (1890-1970) was a prodigy who received his education in the United States. In 1905 he was sent to Paris as an apprentice to an art dealer, and in the years that followed he witnessed the birth of Cubism, discovered primitive art, and learned the techniques of woodcarving from a frame maker.

 Back in New York City by 1910, Laurent began carving pieces such as The Priestess, which reveals his fascination with African, pre-Columbian, and South Pacific art. Taking a walnut plank, the sculptor carved the expressive, stylized design. It is one of the earliest examples of direct carving in American sculpture. The plank's form dictated the rigidly frontal view and the low relief. Even its irregular shape must  have appealed to Laurent as a break with a long-standing tradition that required a sculptor to work within a perfect rectangle or square.

John James Audubon, nineteenth-century artist and naturalist, is known as one of the foremost authorities on North American birds. Born in Les Cayes, Haiti, in 1785, Audubon was raised in France and studied art under French artist Jacques-Louis David. After settling on his father's Line Pennsylvania estate at the age of eighteen, he first began to study and paint birds.

In his young adulthood, Audubon undertook numerous enterprises, generally without a tremendous amount of success; at various times during his life he was involved in a mercantile business, a lumber and grist mill, a taxidermy business, and a school. His general mode of operating a business was to leave it either unattended or in the hands of a partner and take off on excursions through the wilds to paint the natural life that he saw. His business career came to end in 1819 when he was jailed for debt and forced to file for bankruptcy.

It was at that time that Audubon began seriously to pursue the dream of publishing a collection of his paintings of birds. For the next six years he painted birds in their natural habitats while his wife worked as a teacher to support the family. His Birds of America, which included engravings of 435 of his colorful and lifelike water colors, was published in parts during the period from 1826 to 1838 in England. After the success of the English editions, American editions of his work were published in 1839, and his fame and fortune were ensured.

Birds that feed in flocks commonly retire together into roosts. The reasons for roosting communally are not always obvious, but there are some likely benefits.

In winter especially, it is important for birds to keep warm at night and conserve precious food reserves. One way to do this is to find a sheltered roost. Solitary roosters shelter in  dense vegetation or enter a cavity - horned larks dig holes in the ground and ptarmigan burrow into snow banks - but the effect of sheltering is magnified by several birds huddling together in the roosts, as wrens, swifts, brown creepers, bluebirds, and anis do. Body contact reduces the surface area exposed to the cold air, so the birds keep each other warm. Two kinglets huddling together were found to  reduce their heat losses by a quarter and three together saved a third of their heat.

The second possible benefit of communal roosts is that they act as “information centers.” During the day, parties of birds will have spread out to forage over a very large area. When they return in the evening some will have fed well, but others may have found little to eat. Some investigators have observed that when the birds set out  again next morning, those birds that did not feed well on the previous day appear to follow those that did. The behavior of common and lesser kestrels may illustrate different feeding behaviors of similar birds with different roosting habits. The common kestrel hunts vertebrate animals in a small, familiar hunting ground, whereas the very similar lesser kestrel feeds on insects over a large area. The common kestrel roosts and  hunts alone, but the lesser kestrel roosts and hunts in flocks, possibly so one bird can learn from others where to find insect swarms.

Finally, there is safety in numbers at communal roosts since there will always be a few birds awake at any given moment to give the alarm. But this increased protection is partially counteracted by the fact that mass roosts attract predators and are especially  vulnerable if they are on the ground. Even those in trees can be attacked by birds of prey. The birds on the edge are at greatest risk since predators find it easier to catch small birds perching at the margins of the roost.

What we today call American folk art was, indeed, art of, by, and for ordinary, everyday “folks” who, with increasing prosperity and leisure, created a market for art of all kinds, and especially for portraits. Citizens of prosperous, essentially  middle-class republics — whether ancient Romans, seventeenth-century Dutch  burghers, or nineteenth-century Americans — have always shown a marked taste for portraiture. Starting in the late eighteenth century, the United States contained increasing numbers of such people, and of the artists who could meet their demands.

The earliest American folk art portraits come, not surprisingly, from New England — especially Connecticut and Massachusetts — for this was a wealthy and  populous region and the center of a strong craft tradition. Within a few decades after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the population was pushing westward, and portrait painters could be found at work in western New York, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. Midway through its first century as a nation, the United States's population had increased roughly five times, and eleven new states had  been added to the original thirteen. During these years the demand for portraits grew and grew eventually to be satisfied by the camera. In 1839 the daguerreotype was introduced to America, ushering in the age of photography, and within a generation the new invention put an end to the popularity of painted portraits. Once again an original portrait became a luxury, commissioned by the wealthy and executed by the  professional.

But in the heyday of portrait painting — from the late eighteenth century until the 1850's — anyone with a modicum of artistic ability could become a limner, as such a portraitist was called. Local craftspeople — sign, coach, and house painters — began to paint portraits as a profitable sideline; sometimes a talented man or woman who began  by sketching family members gained a local reputation and was besieged with requests for portraits; artists found it worth their while to pack their paints, canvases, and brushes and to travel the countryside, often combining house decorating with portrait painting.

It is commonly believed in the United States that school is where people go to get an education. Nevertheless, it has been said that today children interrupt their education to go to school. The distinction between schooling and education implied by this remark  is important.

 Education is much more open-ended and all-inclusive than schooling. Education knows no bounds. It can take place anywhere, whether in the shower or on the job, whether in a kitchen or on a tractor. It includes both the formal learning that takes place in schools and the whole universe of informal learning. The agents of education can range from a revered grandparent to the people debating politics on the radio, from a  child to a distinguished scientist. Whereas schooling has a certain predictability, education quite often produces surprises. A chance conversation with a stranger may lead a person to discover how little is known of other religions. People are engaged in education from infancy on. Education, then, is a very broad, inclusive term. It is a lifelong process, a process that starts long before the start of school, and one that  should be an integral part of one's entire life.

Schooling, on the other hand, is a specific, formalized process, whose general pattern varies little from one setting to the next. Throughout a country, children arrive at school at approximately the same time, take assigned seats, are taught by an adult, use similar textbooks, do homework, take exams, and so on. The slices of reality that  are to be learned, whether they are the alphabet or an understanding of the workings of government, have usually been limited by the boundaries of the subject being taught.

For example, high school students know that they are not likely to find out in their classes the truth about political problems in their communities or what the newest filmmakers are experimenting with. There are definite conditions surrounding the  formalized process of schooling.