BECOMING A SCULPTOR
A note to young artists
Creativity runs in my blood.
My father was an engineer and inventor, my mother a voice student at Juilliard.
My father’s workshop had all sorts of tools. I learned how to make things — carts, bookcases, tree houses.
In grammar school, I got permission to take a shop class even though I was a girl! Remember, this was in the early 1950s, before Title IX.
I was required to take sewing and cooking classes, but early on I loved creating things, writing stories, and drawing pictures.
My family encouraged me.
At school, it was sometimes a different story.
My father and I liked to watch the Friday night fights on TV. The bulging muscles of the boxers fascinated me. So, in fifth grade art class, I made a male torso out of clay—nothing racy, just the midsection showing the chest muscles.
The teacher sent me to the principal’s office! He thought I was too young to be thinking about "all that.”
It was a crushing blow.
Teachers who insist on having you color inside the lines can frustrate young artists who think differently because they see differently and they operate differently.
Trying something new and challenging is exciting, but it often disturbs other people. Fortunately, for the world, art has a powerful drive; it wants to come out.
In me, it was very persistent.
I went through school, college, graduate school, marriage, and had children, but art was always there. Like Cinderella, she lived in my brain, relegated to cleaning the fireplace.
But after all, she was a princess and her true nature needed to emerge.
After years of trying hard to live life as a wife, mother, and business partner in the vineyard my husband and I established, I became emotionally ill and was hospitalized.
There was no question of returning right away to the marriage, the vinyard, or even my children.
After a long recovery time, I regained my composure and decided to go to art school.
I had taken classes and workshops, but never as a full-time student. I chose the famous Museum School, connected with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Not knowing if I had enough required courses to start formal schooling, I met with the school’s director. I showed him photos of my work, furniture I designed, and a few drawings.
"Just apply," he said with a smile.
And like that, I was in.
I spent two glorious years learning how to sculpt.
The Museum School was like being in the world’s biggest candy store. I was in my forties when I met with an advisor to choose my courses. With a laugh, he said,
"You look old enough to decide what you want to study."
My Cinderella had found her place in the world—as an artist—and she never looked back.
I started by teaching myself at first. I took out a library book with pictures of stone carvings and tools and books about famous stone carvers.
I loved the work of Henry Moore and the Mexican sculptor Zuniga.
When I got to the Museum School, they didn't have anyone who taught stone carving, so I badgered the head of the sculpture department.
“This is the world’s oldest art medium,” I told him, “and there are five of us already here carving stone, self-taught.”
The department coughed up $500 and hired three outside faculty for a semester. A different teacher came once a week.
We learned that it was important to protect our eyes, hands, ears, and lungs and what kind of safety equipment to use. We learned how to forge our own tools, and we were shown different carving techniques.
We toured the large stone sculptures in the Mount Auburn Cemetery.
We took a taxi to a demolition and construction site in Boston to get discarded limestone from the window sills of old apartment buildings.
We came back with a bunch of large rocks and hauled them laboriously into the school elevators and on to the plaster room. Our instructor started to laugh. Every rock was granite, too hard for us to start on!
The school had to buy us some limestone.
First, we made sandboxes on raised platforms to steady the rocks. Then we did a lot of carving and laughing as we hacked away.
At day’s end, I happily headed home with traces of stone dust on my jeans and boots. On the shuttle, the men and women, in their natty business outfits, would frown at me in disgust.
Now, over forty years later, I’m still getting dust on my boots and disapproving looks.
Gratefully, and with a lot of support, I am also able to be a parent again, and more recently, a grandparent.
What do you want to carve?
You are limited only by your imagination and the characteristics of the stone itself.
And how do you make a living from carving?
That can be tricky. There is a saying among artists: "Don’t quit your day job." Because only about five percent of us in the United States make a living solely from art; the rest of us do it in our spare time.
But creativity is so insistent that eventually it will come forth. And what happens when your princess (or prince) emerges can be one of the most exciting adventures of your life.
The images in this post show the stones and styles I have experimented with over the years. Pieces available in my online store are marked with an asterisk.
From the top:
Man in a Dory, alabaster
American Primitive (my Elvis), Virginia soapstone
Working on a sculpture called Stone Song, 1989 photo by John King
A double canister mask for lung protection
Stone chisels
Joyous Bear, alabaster with brass medallion inlay
School of Fish, soapstone, brass rods on salvaged pier wood