Tyndall limestone - or surface patterns and form

[don dougan <dondougan@zzzzzzzz>]

Hi Deb, Karen, and anyone else who wants to hear my two cents' worth on
this topic.

You're not alone in my book, but it is a tightrope walk.  Let me explain
. . .

As the art school I was attending had no one on the faculty at the time
who knew how to carve stone, I taught myself through reading Jack C.
Rich's MATERIALS AND METHODS OF SCULPTURE and Don Z. Meilach's
CONTEMPORARY STONE SCULPTURE.
At this point (early 1970's), there were few artists carving stone
locally, and over the next few years I discovered there were only three
or four sculptors in the Atlanta area who were carving stone besides
myself.  Though I eagerly devoured all the information I could from
seeing the other's works in gallerys and exhibits, I couldn't help but
feel that one of the carvers' work was (sometimes) problematic.

She was probably the best craftsman of any of the local stonecarvers, and
she certainly was a class act in terms of styling and sophistication in
her work.  The problem came in when I looked at her choice of material in
conjunction with her imagery and scale.

She went to Pietrasanta Italy to carve every year, and always came back
with these simply gorgeous varieties of stone.  Her imagery was both
representational and abstracted, though the type for which she was best
known were figurative forms similar in feeling to Henry Moore's figures.
Though not as powerful as Moore's figures, her imagery was perhaps a bit
more 'stylish' and refined than his.  Her work always had clean lines,
graceful curves, elegant shapes, polished surfaces.

Most of her work was impeccable in both execution and presentation . . .
but sometimes in my opinion she would let her love affair with the
material overcome her forms.  Using dramatically veined stone with
intensely-colored swirls and patterns without regard for the scale of the
form she worked.  You couldn't see the figure for the stone!  As an
aspiring stone sculptor I asked, "How could such a discerning sculptor
allow that to happen?"

Though we got to know each other over the following twenty-some years
(same art exhibits, etc.), we never really got the chance to be more than
acquaintances.  However, a couple of years before she died, the subject
of beautiful (stone) material versus form came up in one of those very
social 'gallery opening' conversations while nibbling crackers and
sipping wine.  She more-or-less said that she couldn't resist the beauty
of the material, and I inferred (that she implied) her aesthetic simply
fell flat in the face of the intensity of the color and patterns in the
lavender marble (unknown source!), or Italian portoro marble, or Italian
giallo di Siena marble, for specific instances.

There was one type of stone we both had managed to acquire, rosso levanto
- an Italian serpentine with reddish and purplish overtones with some
dark green mottling and white veins, all swirling this way and that.
Tricky to carve from a technical standpoint.  I thought long and hard
about how I would use it, and in the end I carefully cut it into a very
regular rectangular block (not how I acquired it) and mounted it in/on a
piece of split Indiana limestone (buff colored porous oolitic limestone)
so the rectangular form didn't compete with the patterning of the stone.
She, on the other hand, carved hers into a hard -to-read but fairly
realistic image she titled 'Femina' or something similar, it being a
teardrop-like in-the-round interpretation of female genitalia.  Perhaps
in this case her choice of material and scale (this was about 14" to 16"
high) was deliberately chosen to obscure the imagery to some degree, or
perhaps for a slightly-less-modest purpose it was chosen to mimic the
'complex mystery of woman.' (my quotes here  ;-) )  (Please Note: In this
case I didn't find her choice of form for the stone as egregious as
sometimes (admittedly, few-and-far-between) it could be, I chose this
simply because I could contrast our methods of design using the same
material.  Her piece was beautiful, but if I had been doing her imageform
I would have chosen a stone with much less pattern so the beauty of the
form wasn't hidden.)

To make a long story shorter, her work was beautiful, as was her
material.  She almost never worked in 'plain' stones.  In my opinion,
this is a pitfall for all too many novice carvers.  The seduction of the
beauty of the material makes one forget that it is only one of the
elements that make up a sculpture.  Though I love all the infinite
variety available in natural stone, I feel that I would be doing the
materials a great injustice if I didn't try to marry the material to form
and the scale in each and every work.

Just because the bottle of wine is old and expensive doesn't mean it will
follow that its taste will be sublime - it might just be vinegar.
Unfortunately, too many stonecarvers seem to see only the beauty of the
material and proceed to carve the same thing out of Persian red
travertine that they would carve out of Indiana limestone.

And while I'm on a high horse that is going to get me lots of indignant
replies, might I add that polishing is far too overrated too?  Especially
by novice carvers.  I was one once, and I admit those early carvings were
always polished to the best of my ability from one end to the other.
Now, when I see a highly polished stone sculpture in an exhibit, I look
back at my own early efforts and think what a waste of energy most of the
polishing was.  It did what I wanted, sure, it made it shiny and showed
off just how beautiful the stone itself is . . . the problem is that I
mistook that for art.  Just like as a child I mistook the jewelry
department at Woolworth's . . . all that glittering gold and sparkling
gems . . . for treasure.  I'm sure my mother wore it all out of love, not
because she thought it tasteful.

And "yes, I walked three miles to every day to school in the rain and
snow when I was your age."

Alright, I'm now a sitting target for all the stones you'll sling at me.
What's the point in getting to be an old fart if you can't be a
curmudgeon?

Good Carving to All,
Don

http://www.dondougan.homestead.com/indexdd.html