American Pie: Stoned!
...As I sanded and polished, my piece of alabaster started to glow with a pink and brown translucency, accented by a network of white veins that resembled a human nervous and vascular system.
At that point I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to get to class, and to start on my next piece...
John Merchant, whose working life was ruled by the need for expediency, finds that stone carving has radically improved hia patience and concentration.
A little over a year ago I signed up for a stone carving class. At the entry level you don’t qualify to call it sculpting. I’d been doing clay sculpture at our local Art League for a while, in a studio next to the stone carvers’ area, and came in for a lot of good-natured ribbing from the “chipmunks,” as I call them, along the lines of “When are you going to quit this wimpy stuff and get into some real sculpting?”
At the time I had no desire to make the change. Stone carving seemed to me to be noisy, dusty, and frankly just too much like hard work. But then there came a time when I hit a dead end with my clay work, and at the same time saw the very beautiful pieces that the “chipmunks” were turning out.
Some of them have been sculpting for a number of years, and the pieces they produced are far from being amateurish. So I decided to take the plunge, and on the day of my first class, picked out a piece of alabaster. I feel dumb confessing this, but I had no idea how heavy even relatively small pieces of rock are.
The lump of alabaster that I would develop a very intimate relationship with over the next five weeks weighed 50lbs when I started to work on it, and it’s a mere 14 inches high by about 14 inches long and 8 inches thick at its widest. It didn’t look like much at all in the beginning, something akin to a piece of pinkish sandstone.
Alabaster is a good stone for a novice to start with because it is relatively soft. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s about a 3. On the other end of the scale is marble and granite. I had a good selection of tools that I had accumulated over the years, but quickly found these were unsuitable for the controlled work I was now embarking on.
My masonry hammer was too heavy, my chisels were too large and my rasps too dull for this work. That’s when I discovered that I would need to invest a small fortune in proper stone carving tools. This voyage of discovery that I had embarked on was becoming painful both physically and fiscally.
Creating representational art does not appeal to me, so my design was for an abstract piece. I say “design,” but I quickly learned that working with stone requires a certain amount of flexibility in that pieces break off, and as the work progresses, faults emerge that can require a rethink. But by and large the piece turned out much as I had conceived it.
One of the potential rewards that keeps you going through the often tedious phases of shaping and texturing the stone, is that one day you’ll start the finishing process, when the beauty of the veining and coloring will be revealed. As I sanded and polished, my piece of alabaster started to glow with a pink and brown translucency, accented by a network of white veins that resembled a human nervous and vascular system.
At that point I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to get to class, and to start on my next piece. I’d spotted a rock with an interesting shape that I thought had possibilities. It turned out to be marble, and at that time I had no idea that marble is one of the hardest stones.
After all, the beautiful, lifelike marble statues that sculptors such as Michael Angelo produced, provide no clue to the brute strength and tedious work that went into producing them. With no power tools or hard steel alloy chisels, and no diamond sandpaper, one can only wonder at the fine detail and flowing lines.
I have been working on my marble now for several weeks, and for most of the time it’s been a love hate relationship. My original concept has gone through several revisions to accommodate emerging fault lines and pieces that broke off. Hard as marble is, it fractures and chips very easily. I’m at a stage now where I treat it like a newborn child, afraid that all the work will be for nothing if a major fracture occurs.
Most of my working life was ruled by the need for expediency, and “getting it done yesterday.” Aside from the sheer pleasure of creating art, stone carving has radically improved my patience and concentration, and also strengthened my resolve to make something as perfect as I’m able to, irrespective of the time it takes. The “chipmunks” really did me a favor.
As a footnote, pictures of my alabaster, and clay sculptures, can be seen on my web page at the address appended to this article.
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To read more of John's entertaining commentaries on life in America and life in general please click on http://www.openwriting.com/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=john+merchant
To see his sculptures visit
http://home.comcast.net/~jwmerchant/site/
