Expanding DEEPER into Your DETAILS – How I Carved My Soapstone Grizzly Bear Sculpture ‘Hemlock’

This piece began as the second block of a single piece of soapstone I cut into 2 equal parts. (The other half of this stone I carved into the sitting bear ‘Cedar’ – Check out the ‘Cedar’ gallery here) And here is an interesting fact,  it is the first piece of soapstone I have ever carved in 8 years that didn’t have a single crack running through it. So going into this piece I knew it would be a nice stone to carve knowing I wouldn’t have to worry about any cracks in the stone, so from this perspective already going in I am quite calm. Sometimes working with stones with cracks can generate a bit of anxiety as you do your best to work around them so here I could more focus on the design and execution rather than wondering if a crack in the stone is maybe going to cause a problem.

From the beginning of this piece I decided I would carve full hair details over the entire body which I have only ever done with 4 or 5 pieces so I was interested to see how this would work out as I have had success with this kind of detailing before but this would be the first soapstone piece ever I would be doing in this way.

I chose a simple pose for this bear. Sometimes simple can be powerful. At times I aim for movement and something a little more dynamic and other times I will aim for simplicity. Often I will come across photos of bears doing nothing but standing there and for some reason I am completely captivated by the image/pose.

I have found you can have a successful carving of an animal in simple pose or a more elaborate pose – but my approach for this one was ‘All Poses Are Created Equal!, lol, that is the phrase that echoed in my mind as I began carving this piece, ‘All posses are created equal’ and I trusted my initial vision of going for a simple but powerful stance.

A friend of mine told me this story of how when she was practicing dance that one of the exercises that was given to her was to dance using only her hands! At first this might seem like a limitation to someone who is used to dancing with her entire body, but the purpose of the exercise was to show how much is possible with dancing only with your hands and so as you focus in on this one part of your body and begin exploring, deepening and expanding your awareness of just your hands and all the intricacies and possibilities within this expression alone you begin realizing how much more is possible that you were not accessing and so then when you go back to dancing with your whole body its like suddenly there is so much more there to work with.

That story has always stuck with me when ever I think I am stuck in something I am seeing as a limitation.

And interestingly with this carving, I ended up ‘going deeper’ into the detail and pushing and expanding my expression into other areas of the carving. Rather than for instance focusing my attention on the pose of the bear, I kept the pose simple and ended up expanding into the details of the fur more deeply as well as adding a moss effect to the rock base which is also a NEW dimension I have never done before.

Overall this piece has quite a lot of depth and I am pleasantly satisfied also with the pose of the bear. I have had this one sitting on my desk at home for a few days before it finds its way to the gallery and I have to say it has really grown on me. The textured detail of this piece has made it a truly unique carving and has inspired me to continue developing this technique. ‘Hemlock’ Is going to make a beautiful piece in someone’s home one day.

Click to view the FULL GALLERY of ‘Hemlock’ and find out more about this piece.