In his new book "The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making" David Esterly tells the story of how Grinling Gibbons' art of wood carving changed his life.

David Esterly was studying the work of Yeats at Cambridge University when one day he came across a stunning wooden carving inside a London church and that vision changed his life forever.

Recalling that moment, he told Jacki Lyden, host of "All Things Considered" in an interview: "On the panel behind the altar, I saw these extraordinary cascades of leaves and flowers and fruits, carved to a fineness and fluent realism, which seemed to me breathtaking."

Later Esterly learnt that the wood carving he so admired was the work of Grinling Gibbons. Immediately Esterly started immersing himself in the art and is now one of the most eminent carvers in New York and has now written a book about his experiences.

Esterly admits that carving is a lonely profession because it is such a "time- consuming" activity, leaving the artist no time to socialize. " And most professional carvers, when they look at Gibbons' work - which is such high relief, and the excavations are so huge and the undercutting is so radical, and the surface detail is so fine - they see this as a shortcut to starvation. So I was just about the only person doing this kind of work full-time, for a living, from scratch. It was a small field then, and it's a small field now," reveals Esterly.

Esterly also reveals what a big fan he is of Gibbons' work. "When I first saw Gibbons' work in close quarters ... I nearly came out in hives. I was so astonished by the flamboyance of his modelling, and by the fineness of his cutting and undercutting. And then I went back to my workshop in upstate New York and stood at my desk - I remember, with my hands on my hips - and I looked at my own work almost with a sense of despair."