New Marble Sculpture Gymnast

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),
I am still trying to get caught up after so much whirlwind these last several months. And I wanted to share with you a little bit of news, in anticipation of my next art newsletter. Here is the “Gymnast” marble carving that I have been writing about on my blog for a good part of 2011. She is currently on exhibit at Carved Stone in Dripping Springs, Texas. For more images, click here: http://www.borsheimarts.com/sculpture/2011/gymnast-marble.htm.

Because of a variety of questions that I have received, I recently rearranged the items on the right-side column of my blog. The “Search This Blog” feature is now much closer to the top (right over the “About Me” section) and I hope that will make it easier for you to find a topic of your choosing. You would have to visit the actual blog site (http://artbyborsheim.blogspot.com) to see this column. Also, in a shameless plug, if you are enjoying these posts and would like to support the time and effort I put into the photographs and the writing, you may donate in any amount you wish (People tend to give about $20 per donation) via a PayPal link in this column. In addition, I am an Amazon.com affiliate and you may indirectly support this blog as you shop there – but first, you must visit my blog online and scroll down to the “Search Amazon” window box. Then just start your shopping from my page! Thank you so much. http://artbyborsheim.blogspot.com

Lagniappe: How cool is this? Poet Claire Emba paired my pastel art "Songbird" with her poetry on her blog posting:
http://poetrybyemba.blogspot.com/2012/01/normal-0-microsoftinternetexplorer4.html

Stone Turtles 500 blog posts

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

This is my 500th blog post! And I want to talk turtles. I am still working on the details of my marble “Gymnast” and hope that you have been following along. I must admit that I am running out of energy right about now, so I hope that you will pardon me for just adding these images of one of the heads on the four-headed turtle who supports the “Gymnast.” I am having a fun time with the subtle and different textures I am carving into the stone. And it brings a smile to think of turtle lips!

Sculpture Show Invitation – Wesley Gallery, Texas

22-23 October 2011
Sat: 10 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Sun: noon - 5:00 p.m.

Metal and Stone Sculpture Show hosted by Wesley Gallery
Wesley Gallery
27008 RR12, Ste. A
Dripping Springs, Texas 78620
For information, please contact Julie Speir at the gallery via telephone at 888.806.0678
E-mail: art@wesleygallery.com

I hope you can make it (and yeah, I will have some copies of my new book “My Life as a Street Painter in Florence, Italy” available this weekend – signed too, if you like.

Touching Stone

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

One of the most difficult things to do in stone carving is to have two objects touch without making one too long or too short. While I have plenty of carving left to do on the base of my “Gymnast” marble sculpture, it is time to address how the hips of the figure will rest upon the turtle shell that holds her up.

Also, I have been working on many different parts of the figure - from hair to toes to her chest and neck and her hands. It is time to refine the shape of her hips as I figure out the connection to what is below. Categorically, my work falls somewhere between reality and abstraction. So, while I will not be creating an exact replica of the soft flesh of even the strongly developed gluts of an athlete as it is pressed over a hard form, I do want a great line for many viewpoints. I want the eye to move along, and I want the viewer’s hand to pass over the marble figure and feel a soft sensuality in the cool stone.


While I had planned last night to go into town for a late night concert of Indian music, I decided to stay home instead and photograph my crotch. That sounds like a lot more fun than it was. But after I got cleaned up and lost all of the day’s stone dust, I donned a pair of tights and tried to emulate the pose. This is part of the problem: I do not want this sculpture to look like me. However, when I am carving, it is actually my body that is the most available. I am happy that I have no neighbors nearby since I often tend to feel the shape of my own muscles and then draw what I felt onto the stone, adapting the anatomy to fit the work.

But my fingers are too thick to really “see” how the shape feels as the soft flesh folds over a bit of the hard tortoise shell. So, I needed either an interesting set of mirrors or some self-portraits. Hmmm. Scary. But this connection is very important. I asked John Borsheim, the mechanical engineer, to talk to me a bit about how much I could cut into the stone before it became so much like an hourglass that the sculpture would snap in two at that point if there is any stress while moving the stone carving. Better to err on the side of caution. This is also part of the reason for creating the turtles heads UP off of the bottom surface, while the legs will help create a circular base. More on that later . . .


I have not been happy with the hips, feeling that they are a bit large and malformed for a figure that size. I began to feel that the hips were getting too much vertical length and thus went back to my original measurement and cut off much stone. Measuring has always been a challenge to me. I am not sure what these images may tell you, but the hips will start to pull in more to give the pike position that noticeable “V” shape. In the last image (taken at dusk, hence the bluish cast), I can clearly see that I still must cut off some of that thigh as it gets closer to the torso. Anyway, I marked it in the near dark and will continue to shape the stone.


I am at the “dangerous” stage of my stone carving process with this marble sculpture. I say “dangerous” because I am almost to the point in which my mind can fully imagine the finished work. The problem is, the “Gymnast” is physically far from completed. At this stage, my mind becomes restless and my thoughts shift to thinking of the challenges I will have with the next stone. You can see the possible destructive nature of this situation, right?

The good news is that with all of my years of carving stone, I know full well that I will move beyond this step in due time and fall in love again with my current marble. I just hope there is enough time because she is the largest and most difficult carving I have yet attempted and I want to finish her desperately.

No Neck Stone Carving

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

This may sound really stupid, but while I knew that I was struggling with the proportions for the chest on my marble sculpture “Gymnast”, I failed to see the obvious. The girl had no neck! This is not acceptable on a female figure, and rarely even on a male.

Part of the problem is that if you tilt your head forward as if to touch your chin to your chest and then extend your upper arm until it is horizontal with the ground, your chin will be lower than the top edge of your arm (as seen in profile). Go ahead. Try it. I will wait . . .

So, I had been trying to dig down inside my figure, between her arms, and make her chest more slender so as to give some shape to her breasts. A gymnast is not usually well endowed there, but I do want a shapely figure somewhere between abstraction and realism. And regardless of whether you see any part of the human anatomy from certain viewpoints, they still are there and must be accounted for -- at least in the style of figurative art that I am carving.

What triggered the ‘Eureka!’ moment was indeed my frustration in wondering why it seemed that her boobs were so far down from her chin, like an older woman’s might be. I knew the breasts had to be seen under the horizontal arm, and yet, the space inside just felt too long! Well, I also know from my experiences in figure drawing that my emotions or intuition need to be heeded. One of my art teachers once told me after I complained that my drawing felt wrong, “We cannot draw feelings; we can only draw lines, shapes, and tones.” I responded that while I understood what he was saying, my ‘feeling’ was my first clue that something was wrong with the lines, shapes, or tones, even when my spatially analytical thoughts were not catching up with my emotion.

Another teacher came up behind me while I was drawing once and said, “Your legs are too long.” I should have given him my Grandpa Mike’s retort about how everyone’s legs are perfectly long enough to start on the ground and go up until they make an ass out of themselves, but I refrained. I was trying to learn, afterall . . . However, and this was another very important lesson I learned: when you notice one problem, step back to analyze the entire situation before you make a correction to make sure that you have discovered the REAL problem. In the case of my long legs, yes, the instructor was correct in that compared to the reclining torso that I had drawn, the legs were too long. However, upon evaluation, I realized that my task had been to draw this reclining figure to a long dimension of 25 cm. Had I shortened the legs, my figure might have been in proportion, but much too short for the assignment! In this case, my solution turned out to be to leave the legs alone and instead widen the torso and head.

Note: the reason that this particular fix was important is because I needed to learn how to create the figure in the size that I wanted, not just something that looked good by itself. For example, if I had been drawing a model in a specific pose to fit into a multi-figure design for a painting, I would have needed her to be exactly the size she needed to be to work with the rest of my larger composition. Sure, if I get a drawing I like, but it is not the right size, I can enlarge or reduce it during a copying process to get what I need, but why not do it right the first time?


Allora, upon examination, I realized that the “Gymnast” needed to have smaller deltoids, not only to fit her frame, but also to help me position the neck. These first two images show the green crayon marks that I made for the new size. I was a bit nervous about this, since I had thought the shoulders were looking good, especially from the back view. When I make significant changes like this, I tend to let it sit awhile, at least overnight. I like to approach the sculpture with a fresh eye to see if my marks FEEL wrong after having been away for a while. It is an interesting mind game sometimes because we have a tendency to get used to what we see before us to the point that it becomes the norm and change begins to feel wrong.


Once I feel confident that my changes will be good, I tend to get out the diamond blade and be quick with it. I have discovered that if I do not make the correction quickly after a lot of thinking and seeing, I tend to repeat my error on a smaller scale. I mean that if I creep up on the correction, removing stone slowly until I work my way down to the line, that part of my brain that does not like change has time to convince me that my correction is too extreme. And I find myself backing out of what I know needs to be done. Sometimes caution simply prolongs the agony.


As I said before, in 3-dimensional art, the sculptor must make all views work. Lowering the collar bones helps dramatically with the chest. Even if the viewer will not see this part so much, it needs to work. And I must be careful to carve the slope over the trapezius at the top of the shoulder down to the protruding collarbone because of the hunching posture, while still keeping a rib cage that is believable for a young girl’s figure.


In this semi-back view, you may see that she is starting to have a neck. And in the last image, I have that lovely feeling of not being able to remember how the shoulders looked before the cuts. I still have work to do, but it is nice to be back on track.



P.S. For those hoping that I will soon get back to my life and writings about Italy, please bear with me. I had to cancel my trip there this May and June to finish up projects and attend to personal things going on in my life right now. But I will be back in bella Italia in December and cannot wait to bring you new stories and images.

3-D Challenges Stone Carving

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

When painting, the difficult part is often creating a believable figure from one vantagepoint. When working from life, this can be frustrating since even the best models inevitably move. However, when I carve stone, I do not use a model. I suspect the two major reasons would be obvious - the time involved and the dangerous flying chips.

Working in the round means that as I move around the figure, the view and the line must flow in a way that fits. Anatomy may be “wrong,” but if the artist is either lucky or clever (or both), the viewer will never think of these things and simply admire the work.

As I have mentioned before in my art newsletters and in the descriptions on individual works presented on my Web site, often the view most helpful to me as the creator of the work, is the one least likely to be seen by the viewer. That is, the view from above. In this first image, I am standing behind the “Gymnast” marble carving and looking down her rib cage to see the shape of her hips.
Not entirely happy, am I. You may see that the bum sticks out behind the figure on the left more than on the right in an unflattering way. Perhaps you may see the brown crayon mark denoting the separation of the gluts. I have drawn a pencil line to the left of this where I will carve off extra stone to remedy the form problems. I must be careful not to get too “efficient” because not all of the cheek needs to come off. It is only from that ONE vantagepoint -- that one edge -- that needs removal of material.


The next two images show different views of the same area. The first is a profile from the left and the form looks very different! Just a side note: in my markings to myself as a direct carver, the back and forth squiggles indicate places I will remove stone, while the circle is an area I wish to keep. I mark the latter sometimes because it means that I am getting close to the final surface, in relation to the areas surrounding it.


The last image is taken at eye level with the hips. Can you see that this viewpoint gives me a completely different batch of information (while lacking others)?

What a first day of summer in the North, eh?

Impatience with Stone Carving

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Hello again. If you have followed along much on these posts or my art newsletters, you may remember that I tend to work the whole piece of art “at once.” Not literally. What I really mean is that I try not to leave any part too far behind the development of the whole.

In my work on the marble “Gymnast” sculpture, it became time for me to remove some of the base. I know when it is time to remove some of the support when I can no longer envision carving away parts of the figure that I know must be removed because they start to look tiny in comparison to the part next to it. I wanted to shape her hips more, but the stone beneath her was just too overpowering. And also, as I worked the hips, I knew that I would want to start designing the way her hips connect with the shape I want to carve underneath them.


This first image shows the line on the left side of the marble base that I wish to cut off. Note that my wooden support and levelers are location outside of this mark. My first task is to move the supports inside of this line so that the stone will not fall over after I remove some of its bottom.

Since I want to keep the marble block that needs to get cut off, I need to take some extra care when splitting the stone. Normally, I would tip the sculpture on her side so that I could use my diamond blade to cut a “safety stop” into all sides before splitting. However, these days I am working alone without access to another human being when I want one. And if I tried to tip my heavy stone girl over alone, I would either hurt myself or hurt her. Neither is an acceptable option. Safety first.

Instead, I am trying to be patient as I drill deep holes into the stone on the three sides that I can access in order to guide the break once I am ready to make it. Some people think that the mere fact that I carve stone means that I am a patient person. That is a poor assumption. I think that we are all patient in some areas, and hardly at all in others.

My little neck of the woods, Cedar Creek, Texas, recently made the NBC national news for our unusually early drought situation. (The rest of the summer is bound to be another brutal one for our plants!) With the sun and heat we have now here, I have only been working a few hours in the mornings and again in the early evening before dusk on my marble. And not every day. And the drilling is going slowly.

I find myself getting impatient and wanting to just split the stone and hope that it breaks along the line I want. But, the only way that I have successfully convinced myself to settle down and do it right is to remind myself that the marble really will not care. No one (but you, I suppose) would actually know . . . and it would be up to me to redesign my intended sculpture. So, my impatience could cost me a lot of time. And the problem is totally avoidable. Finally, I am terrible company when I am angry with myself.


This second image was taken with my camera’s timer as I used the back end of the axe that I use to chop wood in the wintertime and a metal pipe to hammer the supports further into the stone. I scored the safety lines on the sides and began drilling holes after that. Thank you for following this journey… I wish you patience (when it is called for).

Stone Carving Tools

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

So, here is a brief peek into my little world out in the woods. I am continuing work on my marble “Gymnast.” While I have never been good about names and labels, I will try to use the proper terms for equipment here as I share with you some of my tools.

I bought a pneumatic die grinder with an extension tube at the front, as shown in this first image. Into that I added a double-cut carbide grinding tool connected to a 6-inch shaft. That is about as much reaching as I know how to do, other than to use a Fordham (and I think I broke mine some time ago). But even a Fordham might be of limited use since it has a flexible shaft. I need something rigid that not only will reach the distances I need, but help me push the tool into the marble to carve it. This is especially important since I cannot get even one finger into some of these areas between the figure’s torso and her thighs.


I hope it is obvious from this first image that the main difficulty in carving down into the negative space of the body in a pike position is that the gymnast’s head is in the way! This second image shows you what I really do not even get to see when I am carving (vs. photographing). I am reaching down between the face (upper left) and right arm (bottom of image) and trying to carve a deeper crease between the figure’s legs, just above her knees. It is like hiking in a snowy cave!


This third image shows a right angle die grinder … a Home Depot item with a great warranty. I have traded in two of these babies over the years for a brand new replacement! This stone carving tool also has a double-cut carbide tip with a 6-inch shaft on it. Fantastic helpers, but not many choices in tip shapes unless I am willing to wait and pay for a special order. Patience is rarely one of my virtues!


And even though I cannot always see what I am carving, I still like to draw on the stone to help me delineate various anatomical forms. Something to aim for! A straight pencil with a tapered tip will simply not leave a mark on the stone inside this narrow crevice. In this last image, you may see my thumb up against the figure’s eye as I am holding a specialized scissors that hold a pencil between its front claws. These teeth in the scissors are not designed to hold something as thick as a pencil, but it was all I could think to use. So, I bend the pencil in an angle that I think I want and squeeze the scissor handles very tightly so that I do not lose my pencil when I move down into my “well” of a workspace.

Really, I hope that I can pull this off! What are your favorite tools – for stone carving or any task?

Happy birthday, John! And thank you for showing me a lot about tools.

Awe in Stone Carving

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

“How did you do that?” is one question that seems to define the word “awe” for me. That is the one of the reasons I cannot seem to make a simple design in my sculpture – the attempt to make you (and me) feel awe. But I know that I also do it for the light. Mainly here, I am speaking about undercuts. I get frustrated enough because I am a slow producer, but then in the course of doing the work, I always seem to want to push myself to tackle a new challenge.

So, in my current marble carving project, the “Gymnast”, I thought creating a face that I can hardly reach was bad enough. Today, I took a masonry bit and drilled through the stone to create a space between the upper body and the vertical thighs. The “Gymnast” is in a tight pike position, with her toes pointed to the heavens.

I cannot tell you how wonderful it feels to drill from one end of the stone to the other and have the drill bit emerge on the other side … in the intended position! Twice even – once over the breasts but under the arms and the second hole was created below the breast line. This seems like a no-brainer, but sometimes it is easier to measure the angle of the drill when one is not right on top of it. It is helpful to have someone else around on occasion to act as an extra eye or hand, but it did not happen today and I wanted to get on with it.


After I created the first two holes, I then changed to one of my new favorite tools – a double cut carbide tip on a 6” shaft. As seen here in the photos, I used it to go in from the top between the arms to start to connect holes and open up the space a little bit. I tend to stand back from the piece often to check my proportions and line. At some point, I drew in a line for the bird’s eye view of the breasts, keeping the line further out than I really want to cut. I can refine the line later, but I will never be able to retrieve cut stone.


In this last image, I am looking over the left shoulder of the “Gymnast” and down into the small opening of her folded up form. Really, what was I thinking?

My goal was to finish this marble sculpture before I returned to Italy in May, but I would be surprised if I can pull that off. Still, it is good to have goals.

Stone Carving the Head

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I have been able to carve stone these last few afternoons – the weather in this part of Texas has been quite lovely and surprisingly warm for winter. Continuing work on my “Gymnast” marble sculpture, I decided that it was time to tackle the head of the figure.

The critical part of myself admonished me to just start on it and botch it early on in the process because I would hate myself more if I did all of that work on the rest of the figure BEFORE ruining the face. Thankfully at my age I fully understand that this is only the voice that spurs me to take care to do my best work possible, but …to get to it. The other reality is that my training is to work the figure all around, developing the composition to the same level everywhere.

When I find myself hesitating, I have learned to stop to figure out what my brain is telling me. When I find myself unable to make one part of the stone carving smaller even when I KNOW it must be done, it is because another section of the stone nearby is way too large. There is another part of my brain unwilling to make the necessary changes because it is still seeing the (spatial) relationship that currently exists. And thus, the next step is to take an action that allows the parts of my brain to come to an agreement. Seriously, this is the way that my brain works.


In this case, I am referring to the fact that I could no longer make myself carve the face smaller until I reduced the larger mass of hair surrounding the face. In these first two images you may see that I have begun to carve away the hair above the ears. I am also beginning to remove the “Helmet Hair” effect, by carving the marble closer to the surface of the temple and forehead. Hair lies on top of the skull, but when pulled back, it is not such a bulky form.

In the last two images, I show you how I did the same thing to reduce the size of the left half of the face of the figure. Because I want her ponytail to fall over the back of the gymnast’s neck in an asymmetrical way, her head remained bulkier on the left side where I had left lots of stone for hair. To help myself see just how much I needed to carve, I redrew my centerline down her back and remeasured.

It is true that everything is relative. And also: that making one change affects the other relationships in the composition. All I can tell you is that one of the best feelings in stone carving is not being able to remember what the stone looked like before you made your cuts. Thus far, I have not botched her face!


An aside: I have been getting a few inquiries about whether or not I will be returning to Italy. I am aware that some people read this blog because I have written so much about that charming country. Yes, I will be returning this spring. And in a few weeks, I will be visiting London. I hope to be sharing some tidbits about my museum visits from that trip as well.

I am at the stage in my stone carving of the “Gymnast” that there will not be dramatic changes happening within one or two days’ work. And with the weather becoming more winter-like even as I write this, my time with this project may become more and more interrupted. I am not sure if it will interest you to see every little detail of this carving, so I will try to share some more of my images of Italy and art in general.

Feel free to send me requests for writing topics. I never want to waste your time.
Thank you!

Flossing Marble

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

On occasion I wonder if there is something wrong with me. Today there was one such occasion. I always seem to push myself to the point of “why are you making this more complicated than it has to be?” or, at least, more complicated (read “costly”) than other professional artists would bother with. And yet, I have decided that it is this extra detail that makes the art perhaps worthy of awe and keeps me challenged and intellectually engaged. [Most often, the reason is about how the light falls on the form, such as in the space around the legs in “Eric” and the deep hole between the figures in “Together and Alone.”] I also am learning something new, although sometimes I think the lesson is “Boy, I never wanna do THAT again!” [No, seriously, I am happy when I pull off the complicated part and think the idea works how I intended.]

In this case, I am speaking about my current work-in-progress, the “Gymnast” in Colorado Yule Marble. The female figure is sitting in a pike position, feet reaching to the sky, as she tucks her chin close to her chest, her forehead pushed up against her shins. Her head will be in profile and yet there is enough air space between the folded up body parts that my hope is to carve a beautiful face that I can barely access.


I received some wonderful measuring tools last Christmas. The one shown is a depth gauge. I have drawn (and redrawn as needed each time the marble gets removed) the centerline for the face and legs. And I work out from this line to shape the face. I recently bought a die grinder with a 3-inch extension and this helps me reach inside amazingly well. It is slow going, but I prefer more thinking to wrong cutting. In stone carving, I only get one chance, after all.


While I do focus in one area of an artwork for a good amount of time, I also step back and take a look often at the entire composition. It is not long before I start creating other lines from other viewpoints than strictly working the profile (image # 2).

Many years ago at the MARBLE/marble Sculpture Symposium in Marble, Colorado, I saw a diamond-coated rod that was designed to be added to a hacksaw. It looked cool to me, so I bought it. A couple of years ago, I saw it lying there unused in my toolbox and chided myself for my enthusiastic, but misguided decision.

That said, today I realized that ”flossing marble” is the very thing I need to do! And of the tools that I have, this diamond wire might be the safest one to use for this task. How else can I remove a long and narrow portion of marble between the nose and legs of the “Gymnast”?

I just wish that it did not take so long . . .

If you like what you read, enjoy the photos, and would like to help support this blog(ger) / artist, click here . . .

Portrait of a Young Artist Marley

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Back in February, in the heart of a colder-than-usual winter in central Texas, I had to admit that I would not be able to finish my marble sculpture “The Gymnast.” I am heading back to Italy soon and have so many other projects that I needed to wrap up before I leave.

So, here are a few images of how I have left her . . . for the time being. I also include a self portrait that I took on the day it snowed here: 23 Feb. For me, it was “a wasabi moment,” a phrase I coined after I enjoyed my first sushi with friends a few summers ago. I mean it to refer to any short-lived pleasure that tickles more than one sense.







One of the great rewards of an artist – or anyone really – is to learn that you have inspired a child. Recently on Facebook, I have reconnected with a friend from my college days. He told me that he and his family were enjoying catching up with my activities by reading this blog. In particular, his daughter Marley entertained him by emulating the pike pose of my marble carving above. I am sure that she could assume this athletic position easier than I can!

Later, my friend shared this self-portrait of his budding artist daughter, which I print with permission here. It is quite marvelous, do you not agree?

Marble Hair

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I have not yet decided just how realistic I want to go with the stone carving “The Gymnast.” I know that my style tends towards realism, but I am not necessarily thinking strictly in those terms when I work. And I tend to use hair as a compositional device more than as a depiction of reality.

That said, I still find inspiration in Nature and models. In this case, I have been using my most available model. And I have a lot of hair. I put it up into a ponytail and moved my head about, looking in the mirror and touching my head to see how the hair fell. Often I see better with my fingertips.

Also, there is so much symmetry in this pike pose that I wanted the hair, along with the toes, to be obviously asymmetrical. You may see in the first image that I have redrawn the skull to a more proportionate size. I had left so much stone around the head because I had not yet decided on how I wanted the hair to fall. But it was time to reduce the size of the head so that I could continue to work the rest of the stone sculpture.


If I let something go for too long, my brain will start to make order out of the disproportion and I will no longer see my error as such. At this point, I am working the masses of the hair only from three sides, still allowing myself to change my mind as I go along. The trick is to shape the form as I reduce the mass of marble.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Marble Sculpture Process

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Today was a beautiful day, much warmer than lately. I was able to get in several more hours of stone carving. At first when I stood before “The Gymnast” I worried that I had already cut too much stone from the forearms. But I had forgotten a little about “stone expansion,” a term that sculptor Scott Owens coined to explain how stone seems to grow overnight.

Stone carving is an interesting dance: too much cut and there are no second chances, other than redesign. But there are the evenings when you feel you removed the right amount of stone, only to wake up the next morning and see that you still have a ways to go. Such is the subtractive process.

Generally when I sculpt the figure, I need to get the pelvis situated, then the rib cage, and then the rest seems to fall into place for me. It is a process, with the destination becoming more visible with each mile marker passed. However, in this case, the hips were at the bottom of the composition. And I was a little bit worried about cutting the bottom so much that the stone might become stressed in that area as I worked the upper parts. Stumped.


However, I hear the voice of my friend Vasily Fedorouk often when I carve. When I am not sure what to do next, I remember him saying, “Define your line, your idea, and then make all else work with that line.” I also know that I cannot always work the way I was taught to do. If something bugs me, I just need to take care of it so I can focus. So, I decided to refine the line of the hips. I needed to start the curves that had inspired me in the first place.

In the second image here, you can see the brown crayon I used to draw the curves of the hips up into the legs. I have also loosely sketched in the hamstrings. The back of the leg does not the silhouette make from this view.

As the day started to close, I stopped my diamond blade and looked up to the light streaming in through the trees. The stone dust flying away emphasized the effect. I hope you find this image as beautiful as I do.


Finally, I have worked more angles than I show here, but the line is starting to clean up.
Stay tuned and hope for a warm winter.

If you like what you read, enjoy the photos, and would like to help support this blog(ger) / artist, click here . . .

Marble Carving Gymnast

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Many years ago, I had an idea . . . yup, just one ;-) It began back in 2003 or 2004. I created a maquette (French word for a small sculpture that will be used to create a larger one) in plastilina of a gymnast in a pike position. I needed to make it so that I could calculate what cut of marble I needed. I had been itching to work larger for a while now.

I then contacted the quarry in Colorado and ordered my marble. I had them cut out a block of stone above the gymnast’s head to save me the effort, but more importantly to save the stone for another project. Until I can get enough of the proper tools (for example, a diamond-bladed chainsaw), it is best to outlab these kinds of things. The idea for this sculpture is a symmetrical vertical composition, with a bit of asymmetry in the feet for a fun element (the way no proper gymnast would pose).

I have been collecting stone whenever I have my van with me and a few bucks (or more) in my pocket. The Colorado Yule Marble for "The Gymnast" (center) sat around for many years, but it is the second of the three large stones that I brought home over time. Going to Italy for extended stays postponed this project. In the summer of 2008, I decided to work on the stone a little bit, knowing that I may have to finish this over a long period of time.
Unfortunately, the railroad ties I bought for support and height began to rot and, as you can see in the 1100-pound block of marble to the right, some leveling needed to be done.


Despite the years of dust covering this raw marble and the impending storm (leaving only a diffused and subtle light for my photography), one can still see some translucency in this marble near the top edge of the block.


After cutting away some of the marble block, I had to redraw my design. I am a direct carver. That means that I do not make a large sculpture out of plaster, clay, or wax and then measure and copy it into a block of stone.

Instead, I draw directly on the stone and cut what I do not wish to have there. Yes, I have my maquette, but that is only a tool to help me determine my basic proportions. Soon, I will abandon it and work only with the stone.

And now, for a little self promo of another kind:
Wow -- something I wrote made the # 1 Business Tip on MorenaMedia's blog. So cool!
http://blogmorenamedia.blogspot.com/2009/11/amanda-strong-top-10-links-of-week.html


(Click on the image to enlarge.)

Happy Birthday, Lexi!