In Which Common Sense Prevails

"In creative work, time should not and cannot be taken into consideration," said William Zorach.  He was one of the best American sculptors of the last century, so he must have known what he was talking about (you can see his work here ).

My stone-carving marathon--five days in a row, 2+ hours/day--angered the gods of chronic fatigue, and yesterday I was laid low.  That red block of sandstone will remain unfinished for the foreseeable future, and thus will not be entered into the juried show I had been racing towards.  I can't imagine what I was thinking, trying to carve such a big block in such a short time.

From now on, I will carve by the stone's clock--which runs on geologic time--rather than mine.

Patience, Patience

For someone as impatient as I am, the two projects in which I am currently engaged should save me years in Purgatory. If I finish them, that is.

The first is the wattle fence, about which I wrote here. So far, three of the seven panels are done. I have lost count of the hours this has taken, but it was many. My husband and I, as in so many areas of our life together, have, with barely a conscious thought, established a harmonious division of labor. He works in the woods, selecting sticks, pruning and stacking them. I work in the yard, weaving the ends of the sticks into the existing (ugly) wire fence.

The work goes much faster with two of us doing it, but "faster" is a relative term. Building a wattle fence. like building a stone wall or a stone cathedral, is the kind of time-consuming task that people whose life spans were way shorter than ours used to engage in all the time. Did the medieval shepherd, building a wattle fence to contain his sheep, fret that it was taking up a disproportionate amount of his probable lifespan? My husband and I routinely check our watches to decide how long to work at the fence. We also know that we will probably both live into our eighties or nineties. And I for one think that I'm spending way too much of my allotted time on earth on this fence. The shepherd, on the other hand, didn't have a watch, nor did he have any idea (or did he?) of how short his life would be. Watching the sun travel across the sky, listening for the church bell to ring Vespers, he was probably a lot more relaxed, and did a better job, that we are doing.

With this string of warm, sunny days, I have been going from fence building to stone carving, which I can also do outdoors. And here again, the work seems to stretch all the way into eternity. I get my tools out, whip the plastic cover off the carving stand, and pick up my piece of slate. I am so dismayed by what I see that it's all I can do not to drop it. I cannot tell that the two hours of hard work I put in just yesterday--and that left my neck and back tight, my arms sore--made any difference at all. The surface of the design is as full of scratches and chisel marks as ever.

I'm at that point in this piece where the forms are well defined, and what I need to do now is what I dread: polishing. Every little dent, every scratch must be eliminated to obtain the silky-smooth finish that makes people sigh and ask "may I touch?" First I go at it with a chisel, pushing it at right angles to the scratch with my hand. Then I rub that same little mark--now, with luck, slightly fainter--with coarse sand paper. Then with finer sand paper, then finer (and all the time, the little mark is still there) until I want to dash the slate piece to the ground. That is when I know that it is time to quit for the day.

I am not a patient person. I am not a medieval shepherd or cathedral builder. Why then am I making a wattle fence, and why am I carving stone?

Why Carving Stone Is Easier Than Writing

I've been doing a bit of both lately, and thinking about the differences and similarities between the two.

When you sculpt stone, you take an irregular lump of rock that looks like nothing much and you chip away at it with your mallet and your pointed chisel. Then you chip with your fork chisel, and eventually with your flat chisel. You chip and you chip until your arm hurts and hours and days go by, until eventually you realize that you have taken away (to paraphrase Michelangelo) everything that wasn't the form within the stone.

Writing, at least for me, is much the same process of taking away what doesn't belong. Sacrificing what seems clever for the sake of form and flow. Chipping away at whatever gets in the way of the point of the piece.

But here is the main difference between carving and writing. In carving, you heft your stone into the studio and heave it onto the carving stand, then prop it up with sandbags so it stays still while you whale away at it.

In writing, before you can start whaling, you have to produce the stone. And birthing that rock, that raw material, often feels like it must have felt to Zeus to have Athena burst, fully armed, out of his head. Sometimes the prospect of birthing that rock gives a writer writer's block.

Me, I try to get the rock out of my system as quickly as possible. I try to think about it as little as possible as I'm setting it down, except to remind myself that it is just a formless lump, something to work on later, something for my mallet and chisel to chip into shape. And once the rock is on the work table, I get a great feeling of relief.

Because I know that the rest is just fiddling with the stuff--cutting and pasting, changing a word here and there. But mostly it's erasing, deleting, taking away even what is dear to my heart, until the final form emerges.

Tools, Glorious Tools

Today I got a package from England containing my slate-carving tools, and I am in heaven. The package contained one nylon mallet, weighing maybe half a pound; one beechwood mallet, weighing about the same as a large butterfly; one teensy (6mm across the tip) carbide-tipped chisel; and another chisel, even teensier (4mm).

Until now, I've been carving slate with the same tools I used to carve Indiana limestone, which is almost as hard as marble: big steel chisels, and mallets weighing as much as five pounds. I've said before that slate is like mineral fillo dough. Put a big chisel on it and whack it with a heavy mallet, and chips--noses, chins, eyelids--go flying everywhere.

But these small, light, sharp, super-precise tools give the most amazing control, so that carving slate is no scarier than carving any other stone, and a lot easier on the body. You put the tiny chisel on the surface of the stone, give it the lightest whack, and four specks of dust fly off: no harm done. Put the chisel down again, whack it lightly, and four more specks fly off. You're definitely getting somewhere. (Have I mentioned that one reason I love direct stone carving is that it is slooooow?)

The downside of slate is that it cannot be carved in the round. You can only do bas relief, which is kind of between sculpture and drawing. But, for a lover of line like me, that is not a downside at all.

Beauty Secrets Of A Stone Carver

I was in the basement the other evening, carving passionately at my experimental piece of slate. I was going to a party later, and had planned to change my clothes and wash my hair and make myself presentable. But I really got into the carving, the "ping" of mallet on chisel, the rhythm of the hand, the slowly emerging features. By the time I took off my mask and gloves and smock (really just an old shirt of my husband's), I knew that all I had time for was to wash my face and change my clothes.

The hair...would have to take care of itself. I would brush off the dust and put on a smile and--well, this being Vermont, I probably had nothing to worry about. Brush in hand, I bent over the bathroom sink and brushed upwards from the nape of my neck. Then I straightened up and looked in the mirror, and lo! my hair looked fabulous, if I say so myself.

And then I remembered the one beauty benefit of carving stone. While it will gnarl your hands and stiffen your sinews and damage you lungs, stone carving will make your hair look great. Just look at the portraits of the great sculptors: Michelangelo and Bernini both had nice full heads of hair, doubtless thanks to all that Carrara dust, and so did Brancusi.

I once read that if you don't have time to wash your hair you should sprinkle talcum powder over it, rub it in and then brush it out, and your hair will regain its bounce and shine. Talcum powder, of course, is nothing but very fine stone (soapstone, to be precise) dust.

So I went off to my party feeling all smug and put together, except for the disconcerting smell of slate dust that stayed with me the entire evening.