This week I will be speaking at the 2014 American Craft Council Baltimore Show as part of their Conversation Corner Series.
Many thanks to my son, Gian Carlo, for standing in as my younger-self.
New Construction, marble, 8 x 46 x 14 in.
Ever since I showed the first New Construction piece (the cinder block), people have been telling me: “You should carve a brick! You should carve a brick!”
People are always telling me what I should carve and sometimes they are right. But in this case, honestly–that didn’t sound very interesting. Conceptually it made sense; bricks are another modern material being used to replace what once would have been marble. I am always saddened when I see a set of bricks slapped up where stone steps once existed stoops (particularly those new smooth and perfect bricks that lack any of the charm of the aged and irregular bricks that new-old-homeowners are always exposing). And, more often than not, the bricks aren’t even laid well! And, one or two steps on the outer edges are usually missing or have been re-set at one time or another.
Yet still, “a brick” was still not interesting enough to compel me to just carve one out of stone . . . Then I remembered something that one of my grad school professors, Ming Fay, said during a group crit: “If you are going to do something simple — do a lot of it.”
It then occurred to me that unlike a cinder block, a single brick is not very structurally or sculpturally dynamic, but like a cinder block they are meant to be used in concert. So I decided to just illustrate the thing that I was hoping to speak against: a step made of bricks that was once a step of marble.
New Construction, marble, 8 x 46 x 14 in.
This proved to be quite a challenge. On one hand this is one of the rawest sculptures that I’ve ever done; the broken edge and the un-finished, roughly tooled interior sides were left un-re-carved. On the other hand, because I was trying to represent a series of nearly perfect and identical objects assembled together imperfectly, the piece was extremely technically demanding. I spent a lot of time removing very small amounts of stone to make sure that right angles were actually right angles. Add to that the fact that this particular stone had a wide vein of some of the hardest minerals present in nature.
It would have actually been far easier to carve a series of bricks that were aligned perfectly rather than a series of bricks that are slightly out of kilter. This is definitely the kind of piece that owes credit to my trainers at Manassas Granite & Marble, Inc. who, during my apprenticeship, instilled the technical skills and discipline of the craft of carving that now allow me the ability to make this kind of sculptural work.
So while one carved brick would probably be pretty lame — I’m hoping that twenty-six carved bricks are not.
New Construction, marble, 8 x 46 x 14 in.
Archbishop Lori Coat of Arms, Baltimore, MD, wood carving
So, some folks may be wondering why I have been a bit of a ghost lately . . . well, now that William E. Lori has been properly installed as the new Archbishop of Baltimore, I can reveal what has kept me strapped to the carving easel these last couple of weeks.
The pieces were carved from Swiss Pear wood, a particularly tight grained European hard wood, which can handle the degree of fine detail necessary to properly illustrate all of the heraldry present in the new coat of arms. The hexagonal one, approximately 12″ tall, fits into a slot in the Archbishop’s cathedra (or chair – this is where the term “cathedral” comes from) in the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen on North Charles Street in downtown Baltimore. The Other larger one (about 24″ tall) hangs above the cathedra in the Basilica on Cathedral Street in downtown Baltimore.
Each piece took over 80 hours to carve, paint and gild and to be completed under a tight deadline. so . . . lots of work and little sleep. A third coat of arms has been commissioned and will hang in the lobby of the Catholic Center across from the Basilica. It will be completed in the next month.
An article by Mary Gail Hare mentions one of these coat of arms and can be found in the Wednesday, May 16th issue of the Sun paper.
Archbishop Lori Coat of Arms, Baltimore, MD, wood carving
Archbishop Lori Coat of Arms, Baltimore, MD, wood carving