Another Late Post

Once again, Monday drifted by and I didn't get a post up. It's just after eight O'clock Monday night as I'm sitting here getting started.

 

 

I got a few days of work done this last week, and wound it up with a lot of progress today. I did not expect to be shaping on Easter Sunday, but there was one irregularity in a curve, and it just needed a couple of passes with a rasp, and, well... I ended up working anyway. It's strange, the way this piece is progressing. I don't have a very clear picture of the finished product. When I made the first cuts I could see where the first cuts needed to go, but not much further. And so it has been for this whole project: I can see down the road, but not all the way to the destination. Work, stop, plan. Work, stop, plan. The red stone worked just like this, too. It's hard to remember stuff from twenty years back, but this feels like a much more organic process than the way I used to work. It feels like I'm teasing the form out of the raw stone, rather than imposing my design on it.

Years ago, when I was attending a stone carving workshop, I spoke with a woman who worked in clay.  She was doing a pottery class, and dropped by to have a look at what we were doing as we worked in stone. "I don't see how you can do that," was her remark. 

Now, clay is an additive medium. A clay sculptor generally builds a figure by adding pieces of clay to an armature. Stone is purely reductive. All the stone sculptor can do is remove material. She couldn't wrap her mind around a process that goes in only one direction. I never thought about it like that until she mentioned it, but as soon as she did I understood exactly how she felt.

 

But carving doesn't feel like that. It feels like the shape is slowly emerging from the rock. Or maybe like excavating a million year old fossil, carefully freeing  an ancient skeleton from the petrified mud that encased it. 

 

Only it's not some crappy fossilized lizard bone; it's a strange new shape that no one ever saw before.

 

The next several sessions will be working on the base. I can see, now, where I need to go with it, but it's going to be a long trip. There's a lot of stone to be removed, a lot of shaping. 

Winding stuff up with some random notes, here: Check out the Lophophora! 

 

Twin flowers.

New growth. Soon (a few years down the pike) I'll have over a dozen buttons. Friends have asked if I plan on tripping. Short answer, "No."