All photos courtesy of Nicholas Fairplay.

It’s not every day a sculptor gets to carve one Romanesque statue as part of a project. Nicholas Fairplay had the opportunity to carve two using Indiana limestone that are now on permanent display as part of the College of Fine Arts building at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Fairplay is an artist and his medium is natural stone. He works with stones such as marble, limestone, and sandstone. While his studio is currently based just outside Cleveland, Ohio, his training began in Europe, where he specialized in hand-carved stone, marble sculpture, and ornaments.

Fascinated by the large cathedrals throughout Europe, Fairplay visited one after high school and asked for a job. While they couldn’t hire him at first, he offered to work for free for six months. They brought him on staff and he showed up and soaked up everything he could. It was during that time he fell in love with sculpting and working with natural stone. “When I started carving natural stone, I just loved it,” he says. “I love that it’s three-dimensional.” At the end of his free training, the cathedral hired him.  

Today, Fairplay’s body of work can be seen on well-known buildings in London, including Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Houses of Parliament, and Hampton Court. He’s also worked on Windsor Castle.

When he arrived stateside, he wasted no time contributing to American buildings, including St. John the Divine in New York City, the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City and the five intricately designed niches at Carnegie Mellon University. Of the six niches created when the building was built in the early 1900s, only one was completed. The other five, according to Fairplay, were left unfinished and each niche was to be carved in a different architectural genre.

“It was a very difficult job because all the stone was on the wall,” Fairplay says. He and his team had to slowly cut part of the stone off the wall and work on it on a bench. While removing it, they needed to careful not to damage the work next to it. Other details were done while the stone was still on the wall. “It was like you find yourself carving upside down a little bit. It’s a little bit awkward.”

He researched the niches and statue designs since every detail had to be plotted and sketched out in advance. To create the Romanesque statues, he cut the blocks and kept those on the ground so he could carve them before placing them in the niche.

While carving Romanesque statues isn’t a project that comes across his studio often, Fairplay says this specialized training and artistry is sought out among homeowners, designers, and architects, especially when it comes to restoration projects or those who want truly one-of-a-kind pieces in their homes.

In cases when the client only has a general ideal of what they’re seeking, Fairplay goes one step further and creates pieces of art, carving leaves, snails, or lion heads.

When Fairplay was asked to add some carvings of sycamore leaves as part of the entrance of a gothic style home in Cleveland, Ohio, he knew the client was expecting cookie cutter cut outs and the same style throughout. He decided to carve each of them differently to give them character.

For example, he added a little curling on some of the sycamore leaves and on a few of them he included an “odd little animal,” he says. “In the spandrel, or the triangular piece on an arch, there are three leaves and a little frog,” he shares.

One piece features a cicada on one of the sycamore leaves. Another has a lizard running. According to Fairplay, you’re not meant to sit and stare at the carvings but rather to appreciate those little details when you come upon them. He wasn’t paid extra to include those details but as an artist with some artistic liberty on a project, he loves adding them because that’s what people notice, he says.

“It’s a little detail and you don’t want it to be too dominant,” he adds. “You want it to be just here and there. And that way, it’s more. It’s not in your face.”

Fairplay appreciates being brought into a project, whether it’s through an architect or residential homeowner, and having an opportunity to bring his artistic skills to the table. Recently he’s been commissioned to create large scale stone fireplaces for homes. Some feature details like a lion face (designed so the fire would be in the mouth area) while others are more subtle.  The artistry cannot be underestimated.

The fireplace featuring the lion face was smaller than other fireplaces he’s been designing as of late but even that was six feet tall by five feet wide. He’s currently working on five fireplaces in his studio, some in a gothic style, one provincial French and an elaborate Italian one in marble featuring a Cupid angel holding a shield.

Whether it’s a classic design or part of modern architecture, Fairplay believes that sometimes less is more. You don’t need carvings to appear throughout a building to appreciate the artistry. “I’m not for seeing carvings on every inch of the building,” Fairplay says. A little foliage or detail or ornament can go a long way.

“Some buildings need something like that to sort of enhance and be in balance with the building,” he notes. “To have a sort of small area with some ornament. If you think of art deco, the ornament is very limited and it can actually be very stylized too. But it can be fantastic.”

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An earlier version of this article appeared in the September 2020 edition of The Slippery Rock Gazette. Reprinted with permission. Photos courtesy of Chris Miller and assigned copyright holders.

If you’ve ever explored the beauty and charm of small-town Vermont, chances are you’ve visited Vermont’s state capital, Montpelier. Located just a stone’s throw from Montpelier is the town of Calais, the home of the Kent Museum and the Robinson Saw Mill. It’s also the home of the renowned Chris Miller Studio.

Chris Miller is a seasoned veteran with hammer and chisel who has been creating art since childhood and sculpture since 1976. Mostly self-taught, Chris was influenced by many local artists, including the late Billy Brauer of Warren, Vermont, and the late Lothar Werslin of Sandgate, Vermont. It’s noteworthy to mention that Chris’ studio is conveniently close to the Rock of Ages Quarry in Barre, Vermont, an area known as the “Granite Center of the World” for well over a century. Chris loves the granite from this area. Ask him about Barre granite and he’ll readily tell you why he loves it.

Lessons Learned, Experience Earned

Chris opened his first studio at age eighteen, exclusively doing wood sculpture. However, he soon turned to natural stone. “I had always wanted to try stone, and a few years after opening the studio I went to visit the Vermont quarries. What’s the old saying: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans’? So, after many years of doing exclusively wood, it was nice to try a different material and the techniques used to carve it, and it was a great mid-career challenge to add stone to the mix. There’s also a lot more work in the stone-sculpture world than in the wood-sculpture world.”

Chris has an extensive wood working and carving room in his barn, as well as an area for stone, but is only set up to work on projects up to about one ton. When doing larger scale work, he uses two different studios in Barre that he rents, he explained.

“For the big projects, there are forklifts, bridge cranes, saws, sandblasting, and all the great stuff needed. I tend to work big when I can, and having these tools is pretty wonderful. Because of my back, I try not to work on anything small anymore, because if it’s a hundred pounds or less, I tend to pick it up and move it! When I’m working in Barre, if it’s six, ten or twenty tons, I just wave the crane guy over and it gets moved.”

Chris works with both granite and marble. “I do much, much more granite than marble just because granite is much more durable, and there are more applications. If it’s an indoor figurative thing, marble is really good for that, but if it’s going to be outdoors for years and years, you’re going to want it to be granite. Both soft and hard stones have their qualities just like soft and hard wood. With hard wood you can do finer details better, and with soft wood you can move a lot faster. It’s the same with stone. Some people will suggest the idea for a sculpture, and I’ll know immediately if it should be in granite or marble, because each material also lends itself better to different subject matter. It’s also nice to go from granite to marble to wood and back again, just for a feeling of variety.”

It’s all about finding the right stone for the right project. “I use different stones for different projects, but I’m a big fan of Barre Gray granite, especially the dark gray. The grain is tight, it’s predictable, and it carves really well. Some of the softer granites are more difficult to carve, whereas some dark granites have larger grain and bigger pieces of quartz or feldspar. They are beautiful to look at when they are polished, and when used in carvings that have a broader form, these colors can work out very well. But when you’re carving something with a lot of detail, the colors and patterns can compete with the design. If you’re carving a face or something with fine detail, you don’t want the stone to compete with the design you are working on.”

Know Your Client’s Needs, Understand Your Market

Vermont has a program called Art in State Buildings that’s promoted by the Vermont Arts Council. Each year they grant several commissions for any number of buildings that the state is constructing. Six years ago, Chris was a team leader for one of these commissions and put together a group of four sculptors for a project in the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital. “We wanted to design something that would interact with a very vulnerable psychiatric population in the hospital, so we designed all these therapy animal sculptures, and put them throughout the hospital. We did seven, and from what I heard later on from the staff there, the patients had formed relationships with the animals, and it had a really big impact on them.”

Chris’s clients vary. “I’ll go from doing a public piece, to a collector, to a private commission, to a commercial job. Over the last six years, my work has been divided between museums, commercial work, the Vermont State House, small public sculptures, commissions for private collections and private sculpture parks. It runs the whole spectrum. It’s important to know who you are dealing with. The client can be an individual commissioning the sculpture for themselves, or for a gift, or for a commercial project or for an institution, where you are dealing with a committee. You have to know your audience, and you have to know the cost and know if they can afford it. So I listen intently, find out what the budget is, what their needs are, what’s important, and what the sculpture needs to do. All these things matter.

“After this initial process, I’ll have a basic concept, and I’ll then work with sketches and go back and forth with renditions. When approved, I then make a small sketch in clay (a little maquette), and when that’s approved, I make a scale model. Once they approve that, I make a mold cast in plaster, so I have a hard model to work from. Then, finally, when I’m ready to start carving, it’s a matter of measuring and enlarging from the model. So as far as imagining what the form is going to look like in the stone, all that work was done during the preliminary modeling.”

Chris enjoys the physicality of his work. “Being a sculptor is physically difficult, and why I enjoy my trade, says the guy with three back surgeries. Right now I’ve just completed a project in Georgia. It’s a truck made out of fieldstone, and there was a lot of lifting and hammering, but these trucks are a lot of fun to make. I get really solid reactions when people see them. It’s funny, I can do a beautiful statue, and people are really in awe, but I do a stone truck, and it really draws attention. So I tend to like that whimsical stuff. It goes over really well with a wide audience, and there’s no reason that it can’t be whimsical and crafted well at the same time. I do a fair amount of serious sculpture, too, but I do a lot more whimsical things, like the world’s largest granite zipper that’s displayed in Barre. I also love to do figurative work, and I’ve done six larger than life hands. I like using hands as a subject, because they can express quite a bit. You can express strength, gentleness and emotion with a hand, just as any kind of figurative work. I just really like hands.”

The Challenge of Working in Stone

“I’ve come to realize over the years, that when doing this kind of work you have to do a lot of designing and planning. Fortunately, this fits really well into my personality, because I enjoy problem solving. When somebody comes to me with an idea for a sculpture and there are parts of the idea that seem impossible, I sometimes think, how am I possibly going to do this? But I love the process of imagining a way to do this, and then having that idea rejected, and then having another idea and another idea and another idea, and by the end, I’ve taken the problem and challenges in the design and worked them out.”

Each project is like a new puzzle to solve. “The logistics of it, the practicality about how you are going to go about things and taking into consideration the parts that can break… there are so many different layers that have to work together, and that kind of challenge is incredibly fun, and fits the way my mind works. For example: at a recent remote job in Georgia, doing a project like this involved figuring out the tools I’d need, the materials, renting the equipment, coordinating the deliveries and putting a tent around it. It’s like being a contractor of a large-scale project, and I love this part of the job! When it’s a large sculpture project, with the design, the committees, the subcontractors and lots of moving parts, the design management of this is incredibly enjoyable, just because it makes me use my resources, and I find that really, really fun.”

When asked what a sculptor like Michelangelo might think of his work if he was alive today, Miller said, “He’d probably think I’m a hack! However, he might appreciate that I usually do all the work myself. In his era, the sculptor would design the model for it, and then there would be a team of specialist carvers: somebody who works on drapery, somebody who works on heads, somebody who works on hair and somebody who works on hands. There was a team, and that was the tradition.”

Chris enjoys the entire process. “I like the designing, making the model, roughing it out, the finish work and the installation. People think I’m crazy for wanting to do all of the process by myself. With his students and studio helpers, that’s how Michelangelo could produce hundreds of sculptures in his lifetime, and why I can’t, working by myself. Nevertheless, I’m going to keep doing this as long as I can. I figure I’ve got about another decade that I can swing a hammer. I’m sixty-two and never want to retire, but do want to go to a nine month per year work schedule, making larger public sculptures.”

When asked if he had any advice for up-and-coming stone artists, Miller said: “The thing to do when starting out is to make designs that you want to earn commissions for in the future, because when you’re starting out, you are going to make things on speculation, and if you want to be known as a figurative artist, you need to make figurative work.

“If you’re heading in the direction of public art, you need to do sculpture that would be suitable for public art. That way you can build up your portfolio while doing it with an eye on the future. Commissions are often awarded to sculptors who have a track record of public work. So, if you’ve done something suitable for a public piece, take a photograph of it, Photoshop it into a picture of a public square, and when you answer the call for artists, you can truthfully say, ‘this is a piece that I designed for a public setting.’ So do the kind of sculpture that you want to do to get orders for the future and build up your portfolio.”

To view Chris’s outstanding work, visit his website at www.chrismillerstudio.com.

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An earlier version of this article appeared in Building Stone Magazine.

In Ancient Greece, the goddess Nike personified victory. She was a messenger whose wings enabled her to fly over the Earth rewarding victors of battle or athletic competition with fame and glory. The most famous depiction of Nike is the Winged Victory of Samothrace, also known as Nike of Samothrace. This marble Hellenistic sculpture dates to the second century BC and is one of the world’s most celebrated sculptures. In 2017, it caught the eye of a private Fortune 100 company in Portland, Oregon, who tasked a talented team of professionals to reinvent the iconic artwork on the wall of the executive boardroom at its corporate headquarters.

Reimagining a Classic

Peter Andrusko, master sculptor and owner of The Andrusko Group in Portland has been crafting stone sculptures for over thirty years. “The Winged Goddess of Victory,” a 15-foot-tall, 18-foot-wide bas-relief comprised of basalt and granite, is one of the most complicated and technically challenging projects he has ever worked on. “I’ve never done anything even remotely as complex,” he said.

“In May of 2017, I was approached by the project manager for special arts projects’ at Hoffman Construction Company and began a dialogue about the viability of creating a massive stone bas-relief sculpture. When I was approached by one of the West Coast’s leading general contractors, I was thrilled. They had found me, which in a sense partly validated decades of effort on my part in trying to become known as a source of quality and innovation in a very obscure artisan niche.”

Andrusko learned some “old school” stone techniques from his father, a successful brick and stone mason, but is mostly self-taught, specifically in robotic Computer Numerical Control (CNC) technology, which has been beneficial to his business. “Robotics is not only the future, more importantly, it’s an absolute gift of life to the carver,” he said. “About 15 years ago, the robotics industry changed and started becoming accessible to workshops. Let’s just say it’s a very natural fit and what I know of hand-craft and my natural abilities in technology found a very, very interesting nexus.”

To create The Winged Goddess of Victory sculpture and wall design, which relied on robotic CNC machinery, Andrusko utilized a basalt quarried in Moses Lake, WA, which was supplied by Stone NW in Vancouver, WA, and Indian Black granite from Savema in Pietrasanta, Italy. “This work is constructed from a very hard, dense and brittle local black basalt, which was then inlayed into a field of waterjet textured Italian black granite tile,” Andrusko said. “There is also some lettering carved into the granite, which is also the product of my studio and hand.”

The basalt used for the sculptural elements is a ubiquitous Pacific Northwestern material that is available in various colors, textures, and forms. “In this particular case, it’s an amazingly tight-grained satiny black that takes a polish,” said Andrusko, who worked with a local stone company that cut the rough blocks to-size and supplied the slabs, which were then cut to fit the super tight specs needed for the project. “The core block dimension is 3 x 6 x 24 inches. Of that overall depth, the carving is contained within just 2 1/2 inches of depth and is then inlayed into the Graffiti granite paneling covering the wall.

According to Andrusko, there are over 300 parts in the finished piece, many of which were first roughed into shape with CNC robotics technology, then hand-finished and fitted into the cut-to-fit granite. “It is a process essentially similar to the one used by many stone carving studios throughout time—in this case, using robotic machines instead of human workers, such as those famously employed by Rodin in his studio to perform the roughing from the original models, which in this case are digital files.”

Technology and Design

When designing the 7,500-pound sculpture, Andrusko worked with a professional digital art team, which created the digital renderings from which he worked. “The first and most important aspect of the project was the artwork,” the sculptor explained. “Initially, I was asked to provide the artwork, but the delivery date required for the completed work was rapidly approaching, so they hired a professional digital art team. We worked closely together during the first few months to refine the design. I produced an initial scale model of the carving in high-density urethane along with a full-size section that was approximately 4 x 5 feet.” After receiving feedback on the first scale model, a second was commissioned to confirm the changes would meet the demanding attention to detail.”  Based on feedback of the first scale model, a second was commissioned to confirm the changes would meet the demanding attention to detail.

According to Andrusko, the anticipated weight of the stone on its own was intimidating.  “The immediate need was to minimize the overall mass—getting as much detail as possible for something of this scale necessitated a balance between weight reduction (thickness of the module) and down-lighting. Also, keep in mind that all of this mass is hanging off the wall structure along a thin ribbon of floor inside of a modern-constructed building on an upper floor. Due diligence required some engineering attention.”

A compromise was found by creating a 3-inch thickness overall, with a 2 1/2-inch maximum range to work within. “This got us our range and the digital arts team was able to model the lighting and the relief topography to maximize the effect visually,” Andrusko said. “The reality is that there is a massive amount of ambient light in the space, which interferes to some degree with the LED down-light effect during the day, but some of the imagery was taken at night and one can see an amazing depth and clarity of surface that is truly a wonder; it appears far deeper and more defined than the 2 1/2 inches would suggest. A success by the design team and lighting specialists.”

The design team used displacement mapping to create the digital renderings, an alternative computer graphics technique that uses a texture map or heightmap to cause an effect where the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface are displaced, which gives surfaces a great sense of depth and detail, permitting self-occlusion, self-shadowing and silhouettes.

“The value of this is that the computer software I used to develop the cut files can accurately manage the range of black (lowest point) to white (highest point), which are, in essence, user-definable, which allows the Z-axis to be established properly so that everything fits in 3D,” Andrusko detailed. “The hand-carving is to blend and fit everything and to put the finishing touch into the carving.

“There was a great deal of struggling with the size of the file initially and trying to solve some problems like positioning into the fixed grid of the field materials that needed to be discussed and established before breaking the image into precise parts,” Andrusko explained. “Also, the client insisted on 1/16-inch tolerances between parts. Once all the grid issues were worked out, then the parts were segmented into the modules. I broke out the grid elements in granite from the basalt and cut stencils to mark and fit the granite part by part — hand-cut with a ring saw. I initially proposed that this be done with a waterjet, but in the midst of the time crunch, I elected to keep this in-house to cut by hand while the CNC machines were running. It turned out to be a very good decision for reasons I wasn’t expecting having to do with the final fitting. The G-code files were generated to run the machines and smaller parts were nested into the stones in groups. Everything was coded and numbered so that the parts could be fitted and mapped for the installation team.”

Constructing the 300 parts for the project required an intricate process. “The parts cutting involved an initial ‘roughing’ stage of milling,” Andrusko explained. “About 1/16 inch passes to get to the core shape of the part. The secondary stage of milling involved a smaller bit and a change of trajectory that netted the finished part fairly close to the final dimensions needed. That final step involved stacking the stones into a grid, hand-finishing and cleaning, and tightening the cuts and sharp edges in order to have a smooth transition between adjacent parts. The largest single area I was able to get flat at one time in the studio was approximately 4 x 4 feet.”

While the digital technology was needed to create a sculpture of this stature in such a short amount of time, Andrusko believes that hand-carving was still a key factor in the project’s success. “The robotics utilized in the studio amplifies the productive output of the carver manifold, but it still requires the breath of life of the master carver to perform the final steps by hand to finish and detail the sculpture,” he said. “However, what the technology allows is for a single individual to perform the work of dozens of people working practically non-stop for months on end.”

Even with the aid of technology, completing the project was still an arduous task. “I was able to keep running six CNC machines alone for most of four and a half months,” Andrusko said. “My day started at around 5 a.m. and ended at or near 10 p.m. Cutting hard stone requires a very attentive focus. Water supply is critical or there could be a fire, bit break, damage to the work piece, or at minimum a whole bunch of wasted time, so there was no practical way to run the machines all day every day as much as I wanted to or would have liked to. The machines needed to be monitored constantly and any instances of failure caught and corrected as soon as possible. I was often literally running and constantly on my feet moving between machines, changing parts out, swapping bits, clearing obstructed water lines and quickly became attuned to the sounds (healthy and otherwise) of each machine in the studio. I stopped keeping track of time, but it was a relentless grind of 14 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and other than a few hours for Thanksgiving and Christmas with family, it didn’t stop until I was done.”

The Installation

Andrusko gives the majority of the credit for the success of the installation to the project manager at Hoffman Construction Company and the installation team at Western Tile & Marble. “This was very much a team effort and the success of the whole was really a shared collaborative effort,” he said.

The installation, which was completed in about a month, required one stone mason and three tile setters. The team bonded the wall tiles to USG Corporation’s Durock Brand Cement Backer Board using Laticrete’s 257 Titanium thinset mortar, which is designed for the installation of large-format tiles and gauged porcelain tile panels and slabs. “Thicker carved stones were installed with Latapoxy 310 Stone Adhesive,” said Floyd Goodwin, project manager at Western Tile & Marble. “We used copper wire anchors into studs.”

Goodwin explained how the heavy, irregularly shaped tiles needed to be carefully installed to ensure flatness and desired joint thickness. “Maintaining joint dimensions and plumb was crucial because the carved stone had irregular edges and the substrate was wavy,” Goodwin said.

In addition to Laticrete’s 257 Titanium and Latapoxy 310 Stone Adhesive, the installation team also utilized Laticrete’s Permacolor Select cement grout and Latasil silicone sealant.

“They are truly professional craftsmen and I know they were also working under extreme stress and with a really tight schedule,” Andrusko said of the team. “They took my work and completed the site installation without a break or a scratch. I wasn’t needed onsite. There wasn’t a single punch list item related to the sculpture.”

Since the project’s completion, visitors have been amazed by the artwork and its resemblance to the original Winged Victory of Samothrace. “The client loves it,” said Goodwin.

The project received a 2018 Pinnacle Award from the Natural Stone Institute in the Architectural Carving/Lettering/Sculpture category. “One would assume the hope of any artist is to somehow imbue the breath of life into the inanimate; to effect in some profound way the beholder of the work,” Andrusko said. “That this now exists in the physical world where others can experience it makes me very happy.”

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The beauty and versatility of natural stone are among the many reasons homeowners and builders gravitate to the material for their projects. Artists often are drawn to stone for similar reasons.

My Comfort Clothes by Robin Antar. Limestone.

For artist and sculptor Sebastian Martorana, the challenge and beauty of the material was enough when he first began working with natural stone. “As I have grown, I now see natural stone as the best vehicle for the concepts that I want to explore,” Martorana admits. “Each stone, just like each sculpture, is unique. That cannot be said of anything that is cast or mass produced.”

Sculpture Robin Antar agrees.

In her abstract work, her challenge is to make heavy stone look like it is twisting, bending, and light. “I like the fact that it’s heavy and I can transform it into a sculpture which has movement and form so people don’t realize the weight of it,” Antar shares. “I also work to bring out the beauty of the stone in each piece, carving it in a way that showcases its natural properties.”

Her Realism in Stone series also transcends the weight perception. “I sculpted a pair of jeans in limestone,” she shares. “Nobody realizes it weighs 80 pounds—it just looks like a pair of jeans.”

Natural Stone Tells a Story

Permanent Separation Anxiety by Sebastian Martorana. Salvaged Beaver Dam marble. Photo by Geoff T. Graham.

Many of Martorana’s sculptures are made from salvaged material. In addition to the material’s geological origins and cultural association with memorial and permanence, each stone has its own specific history, which he appreciates and finds important.

“Where did it come from? What was it? When was it installed there? Why was it thrown away?” he asks. “Those answers inform each stone sculpture that I make.”

Even if the piece he uses wasn’t salvaged, where in the world it came from will be of significance to the completed work of art. It is rare for him to pick a stone at random for a sculpture as he always takes into account its individual story.

The Power of Natural Stone as a Form of Healing and Expression

As a sculptor, Antar is drawn to the subtraction process of carving and working with grinding tools. She also appreciates the challenge of taking an unworked, unpolished piece of stone that many might perceive as “dead” and make it come alive.

The Thinker by Robin Antar. Honeycomb Calcite. Photo by Morris Gindi.

Robin Antar, American sculptor, at work. Photograph by Morris Gindi.

The type of stone Antar uses depends on the mood of the piece since she says different stones give off different moods. She offers honeycomb calcite to illustrate her point. “It looks like candy in a way,” she explains. “And when I carve out figure shapes, it has a very different mood than white marble, for example. A sculpture in honeycomb calcite – a light, airy, glass-like stone – would have a completely different feeling than an opaque white stone like marble.”

Robin Antar with David’s Knot in Flames.

Sometimes she’s drawn to a type of stone because of the emotion she’s trying to express in the piece. Different emotions, different stones, she likes to say. When she created a piece to honor her late son, which she titled “David’s Knot in Flames,” she chose a 1,500-pound block of Turkish white marble with purple veins in it, her son’s favorite color and the “secret code” he whispered when life got hard and he needed her help. “If I had done that same sculpture in a honeycomb calcite, it would have had a completely different feeling,” she says, adding that working on that piece literally saved her life.

“Different textures can also create various emotions,” she adds. “The surface can be chiseled, polished, rough-cut.”

Jorge Vascano understands how Antar and Martorana when it comes to the visceral feelings associated with using natural stone to create works of art. He’s currently an artist-in-residence at the North American Sculpture Center (NASC), an annex of Precision Stone Inc. which has been serving the architectural and design community over the last 35 years. The NASC offers artists, trained and untrained, classes in traditional stone carving techniques, clay modeling, digital modeling, and digital fabrication.

Escombros by Jorge Vascano.

The stone Vascano chose to work with during a merit award sculpture residency in Carrara, Italy in 2017 was Bardiglio Nuvolato, a beautiful white and grayish stone full of veins.

“While I was sculpting, and revealing the forms of the sculpture, the natural attributes of the stone, such as the hardness, the way it would break, the inner colors, the smell, the sound when striking, the time it took and the physical demand [all] contributed to gradually see the sculpture differently,” he admits. “The nature of the stone was stimulating past experiences in my life, taking me to places in my mind I had not visited or considered in a long time.”

He began to see these visions in the stone slowly, as if the stone and the process were inviting him to go in a certain direction. He recalls the experience as beautiful because in those long hours of observation and understanding the stone, the material was allowing him to have a conversation with himself. “I felt the stone and its uniqueness were the vessel, the vehicle,” he adds. “At the end, the piece ended up having a way more intense feel that I initially anticipated.”

What It Means to Sculpt Using Natural Stone

Sebastian Martorana, sculptor and illustrator lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.

Unseen by Sebastian Martorana. Montclair Danby marble. Photo by Geoff T. Graham.

Martorana likes to remind people that natural stone is a natural material, so the irregularity that comes with that should be expected and enjoyed. “If you want something that is going to be aesthetically consistent, you can find that in a cast material,” he says. “Natural stone can provide patterns within patterns that have been millions of years in the making. If you don’t appreciate that quality, then natural stone is not for you.”

Vascano feels artists are drawn to natural stone because it has a natural poetry. Unlike other types of material that can be used to create sculptures or art, he says using natural stone is completely different. For one, it’s hard and requires patience.

“You have to learn the feel of each stone to work with because each of them is different,” Vascano adds, noting that is also requires an understanding of how the material needs to be handled, while its composition and its physics also need to come into play in order to take advantage of the possibilities each stone has to offer as well as their limitations.

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