Identifying Beach Pebbles for Carving?

["Clive Murray-White" <clivemw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Continuing from George Graham's advice to take a file along with you when
you go out hunting for stone, a file is good advice but you can be very
surprised just how quickly hard stones will polish your file flat.

Instead of launching straight into the stone with a file I see if I can
scratch it with an ordinary nail, by scratch I mean gouge a bit of a track
into it.

This suits my purposes because I only use marble and limestone. The system
does not work too well on the harder stuff like granite.

To move on a bit, to me the most exciting bit of the process of working with
stones that in many cases have never been used for sculpture before is
discovering what they will let me do with them.

I never start from the position of saying that there is an ideal set of
characteristics but work on the principle that each stone has something
unique to offer, this will be revealed to me by the stone if I allow myself
to have a very honest and completely open dialogue with it.

To digress a little, I remember getting my first lump of Carrara shortly
after I started on stone, the thing that interested me the most about it
when I started working on it with a chisel was how it seemed to keep asking
me to make complex curvy lines. I found myself feeling that this inherent
characteristic may be responsible for much of the look of Western sculpture
as sculptors could give themselves a real buzz carving hair and drapery.

Of course I could have said to myself that this was something I should look
for every I try out a new stone but I don't, instead I try to remain as open
as I can be to where it seems to be telling me I can go, this makes every
kind of stone just as exciting and "good". What's even more interesting to
me it helps create surfaces, forms, feelings and textures that people are
not familiar with.

Back to the search for useable stone: one of the most useful sources is
abandoned limestone quarries, certainly here in Australia there seemed to be
many quarries dotted all over the place accompanied by the large kilns used
for burning the stone. Much of this stuff is very good indeed. I usually
find these deposits by asking local Department of Natural Environment
officials.

beach pebbles.

Often the limestone mines were near creeks or rivers and much of the
material found its way into them, natural erosion then formed them into a
similar item as the beach version.

Another obvious and often very good source of stone is landscape and garden
supply outlets. Stuff that can sound quite expensive when its sold by the
Tonne is often as cheap as peanuts when you only want a handful of lumps.

I have also found that quarries that crush their stone for various purposes
will often let you have almost anything you can carry away for free.

Even the big merchants processing vast quantities of top quality stone have
big breakage problems, so if you are content to use tiny bits of stone you
will probably find unlimited cheap supplies in the place that you least
expected it.

You may even strike gold and stumble across and cheaply buy bigger stuff
that is left over from an order and cannot for some reason or another be
used.

Happy hunting regards to all Clive

http://www.cowwarr.com/CliveMurray-White/