Etched in Stone

I have been thinking about Donatello and Michelangelo. This is a very pleasant pass time. I wanted to go deeper with them. Not merely to study who they were, what they accomplished and attach my own meaning to their work, I wanted to experience the stone.

To further my experience with this study I decided to attempt a stone sculpture. Wow!

I have been working in collaboration with the sculptor Monty Taylor on stone and copper project which started as a charity sort of thing, happily, we liked it so much that we are continuing our efforts into other projects and it is so exciting. He offered me the opportunity to work in his studio on a stone project of my own. This is quite different than painting because there is no immediate gratification. Sculpting stone is a very slow process. I am not use to that. Because of my life style, I am usually able to start a painting and see it to the end in one sitting. Although even that is changing.

But back to the stone. My project is an owl. I have had fun with it and time just suspends. Of course that is what happens when ever I spend time in the creative realm. And if you talk to most artists about what happens when they create they will describe this other world that has no bounds of time. Time does not exist.

I am sculpting my owl in Colorado Alabaster and I have plans to make her wings out of copper. When sculpting in stone the approach is different than clay and even further from the experience of painting.

With stone I am removing the unnecessary. Every day that I go to Monty's studio to work on my stone sculpture, I continue my effort to liberate the owl from the stone.