Page 30 - Demo

30|November 2019
How Artists Use Natural Stone to Create Timeless Sculptures
Escombros by Jorge Vascano. Continued from page 22
an
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.
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,”
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
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 mate rial,” 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
Slippery rock Gazette
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.
For links to the websites of the artists in this story, visit usenaturalstone.org .
artist-in-residence
Questionable Judgement Mrs. A. Janus
Yeager, 49, of Dixon, Illinois, was ar- rested this summer as she motored toward home with an inflated kiddie pool on the roof of her SUV.
CBS2 Chicago reports that Dixon police offi- cers pulled Yeager over after being alerted that there were two children in the pool, riding on top of the car.
Yeager told police she took the pool to a friend’s house to inflate it, then had her daughters ride inside it “to hold it down on their drive home.”
Yeager was charged with two counts of en- dangering the health or life of a child and two counts of reckless conduct.
Mrs. Yeager obviously cares for her children- she thought of the pool as a treat, after all. But this is still one of dumb- est stunts we’ve reported on this year.
“Different emotions, different stones,” Antar 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 Antar and
The Thinker by Robin Antar. Honeycomb Calcite. Photo by Morris Gindi.
Martorana when it comes to the visceral feelings associated with using natural stone to create works of art. He’s currently
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
Unseen by Sebastian Martorana. Montclair Danby marble. Photo by Geoff T. Graham