The Orange Stone

I know. It looks like a giant pot roast, but this thing is forty eight pounds of translucent orange alabaster. It came from The Compleat Sculptor, which is in, of all places, New York City. The stone itself came from either Colorado, or most likely, Utah. I haven't seen this stuff on the market since the late 1990's, and as soon as I saw it on-line, I jumped at the chance to get some. It wasn't cheap. This chunk of rock cost me a little over four hundred bucks. When they find the orange translucent it is most often in narrow layers along with other stone. This piece is a healthy four inches thick, so there's a lot of potential. It had to wait while I finished up the last piece that broke in two. Hope I don't have bad luck again.

The first part of the job is deciding how the stone is going to sit, and then finding a point of balance. It didn't take long at all.  The next step is to make a nice flat foot for the stone to sit on. That part went quickly as well. The stone already had even flat faces, so it took only two days find the right attitude, create the foot, and sand the faces smooth so I could draw on the rock with a pencil.

 It often takes many days of staring at the stone before an idea comes to me. But this piece had only two planes, rather than 360 degrees of differing faces. The outline of the basic shape of the rock, plus the intense vibrant color suggested flames, so the plan practically drew itself.

Wait a minute.

Flames?

Isn't that kind of cornball?

Maybe so. But the drawing looked cool, and I liked it. So here we are:

 This is the result of two days of work on the basic outline:

The long upper tearddrop will be opened up. The smaller one near the base will be a window to let the light shine through. The rest of the stuff? We'll see.

But I'm not going to leave this thing to stand on such a small foot, however well balanced. A lot of sculptors mount their carvings on tiny feet, the stone on tiptoe, and held vertical with steel pins drilled into the base. I can't say it doesn't look cool as hell. But I have my own aesthetic with my stone. Stone wants to sit, firmly anchored to the earth. It doesn't like to dance of fly. I have a very cool plan for a base, but that'll happen in the future. There are many days of hard work ahead before I get there.