My uncle carves stone. Years ago he taught me the basics of carving and I came to know the love-hate relationship between artist and stone. It is a terrible, demanding, dusty, dirty, jarring task to turn a piece of stone into a beautiful sculpture.

I use a pneumatic hand piece with chisels to carve, just as my uncle showed me. The hand piece is a small jack-hammer like the ones used to break up asphalt and concrete. It’s a two-handed tool. One hand grips the handpiece, the other hand holds the chisel in the throat of the handpiece. Using a sweeping motion across the surface of the stone, you chip away little pieces until enough stone is gone so you can switch to grinding tools. After grinding, finishing tools are used to sand the stone to its final polished state. Beginning with 30 or 50 grit paper you gradually progress to 600 or even 1200 for harder stones like marble. That gives the glass-like sheen to the surface. The softer the stone, like alabaster or soapstone, the faster the final finish can be achieved. A coat of wax for protection and the sculpture is finished.

I’ve described the general technique. Lots more happens in-between. Things like “flaws” in the stone which can be on the surface and detectable, or hidden. You know when you hit one, because your sculpture, your piece of solid rock-hard stone, shatters, splits, turns to rubble before your eyes. Sometimes a piece can be saved, reworked into a different design, or repaired with stone glue. Mostly, you start over. Carving stone is a labor of love, and it mimics life perfectly. All the hopes you have for creating a lovely thing can be ruined with a false step, a poor decision, or some aspect that was out of your control. As hard as stone is or seems to be, like a heart, it breaks easily.

I have several stone pieces in progress. The Seal is one of my finished pieces. It is made of soapstone—a beautiful, dark, flecked-with-gold stone on a white marble base. Other sculptures are a Stargazer Fish carved from pink Georgia marble, Goldfish Circling in white marble, and Hornbill Nest, a bas-relief block of Indiana limestone.

Each sculpture is an individual effort, unique. The struggle to create in stone is worth the effort at the end, but during the process, a number of well-meaning agencies furiously compete for the privilege of hauling the artist away to a safer, saner environment (usually padded). Bless them for their futile efforts. A stone carver is as difficult to persuade as the material being carved. Maybe that is part of the wonder and pleasure behind working in stone.

As a substance of this Earth, it has lived a longer life than almost any other. Sometimes its life has taken many different forms since its initial creation in the Earth’s molten interior. It has suffered changes over eons of time. As such, each type of stone imparts a special inner-life to the finished piece. What a noble material is this stone upon which I decide to make my futile marks. What is left when I am done may be a different shape and design than nature intended. But its full life’s experience still remains locked within the crystalline structure that is this unique material—STONE.