Section under construction. This writing is a placeholder and will be replaced.
From the studio
Carving an alabaster sail
How a block becomes something that looks like it is moving.
A sail is a curve under tension. Stone is the opposite of that, which is the whole problem and the whole point.
Alabaster is soft enough to shape and unforgiving enough to punish a wandering mind. It goes quickly at the start — the block loses its corners, the shape arrives in rough — and then it slows right down, because the last eighth of an inch is where the piece either reads as cloth in the wind or reads as a rock someone sanded.
The thinner it gets, the more light passes through it, and the more it stops looking like weight. That is the illusion I am after. A sail that still has mass in the hand and none in the eye.
Then the polish, which is its own long sequence and its own kind of patience.