Humbled by Soapstone
This year so far has been a year of expansion with regards to my sculptures. One of the first big changes I implemented was I began carving soapstone.
I am now into my 8th year carving and up to now have only done a handful of soapstone pieces.
In the past I preferred the harder stone because it is a more durable material and less likely to scratch when complete.
And so I never really gave soapstone a chance.
The truth is, as an artist, I have found it challenging to make a living, not to mention THRIVE, through carving only hard stones like marble, serpentine, limestone, granite, ect. I do know of some highly successful artists who carve exclusively hard stones and do incredible work, but for what ever reason I was finding this road challenging. I equate this to ‘my style’ of work where I enjoy pushing the fine details in the carvings I am creating where these ‘details’ really require a lot of TIME to execute.
Enter soapstone.
Firstly what I realized is that I had a major misconception about soapstone.
I believed that you couldn’t do highly detailed work because the stone was so soft. What I found was that soapstone is actually incredibly dense which enables the stone to ‘hold an edge’ really well, and in fact now I am wondering if soapstone actually lends itself to doing even more intricate work, depending of course if you get a nice stone with minimal fractures.
I also find now instead of spending all my time simply removing stone that needs to be cut away from the form, I can do that in a much quicker manner and I thus find myself getting to invest more time into areas of the carving process that I thoroughly enjoy, like bringing the details of the face to life or refining a limb in a more specific way or even getting to spend some time articulating a more interesting base.
What I am realizing is that soapstone is capable of and achieving some pretty cool results with a lot of new potentials opening up for me to explore with this medium.
In some ways soapstone is quite fluid because it is so soft. You can move it around and push it any way you like with more ease, this I find allows me to actualize my decisions a lot quicker. This also changes how I think throughout the process also where I am actually now making and executing decisions quicker which encourages me to ensure I am present and on point during the process. Don’t get me wrong, it is still STONE and no matter how you grind it, stone is a hard material.
In a way soapstone is more like drawing or painting where things can actually happen more quickly. This is also an adjustment for me to retrain how I approach and execute my sculptures.
I find I enjoy each and every stone I carve and since introducing soapstone into my practice I have become completely enthralled with it. I absolutely love it! It has opened up so many new dimensions of stone carving that insisting on doing only the hard stone wasn’t allowing me to access.
The color of soapstone is also quite beautiful and you can find some pretty unique stones.
What is interesting about all this is that I resisted soapstone for years and created an assumption and idea around it where I was actually placing a limitation on my own creative expression and development as an artist.
I wasn’t really interested in soapstone.
I also wasn’t really interested in abstract work, but guess what else I began carving this year, yes, Abstracts! But that is for a different blog, though it is an oddly familiar story of resisting something for many years to finally giving it a shot and discovering an entirely engaging, dynamic, new and vast reality opening up in front of me.
Thank you for joining me in my artistic journey.
Cheers
Andrew.