A stone’s durability, its existence all over the world, its “green-ness” ( in environmental lingo ), the fact that a stone carver’s work encompasses life from the baptismal font to the gravestone, with houses and bridges and else in between - all these were reasons for me to pick up an apprenticeship in this trade.

Yet stone is expensive. It is hard. You spend hours and hours, sometimes months on a carving. That makes it costly. The good part is its durability. It outlives all of us and - eventually - will turn into an antique.

So I asked myself, should I just carve what I want? Do my thing?
I decided to do custom work. There is always a new challenge and this way I can always learn and grow.
Luckily, very often, I can bring in my own ideas and approaches and sometimes I have nearly complete creative freedom.

What is nice, too, is how people connect through stone carving.
How people appreciate the process, let alone the discovery that it is not extinct.
And its all sorts of people…
Fun
Life



Oh, yes, shop…
this is to be a shop story.
Well I do have a shop. It is the old Fire Station in “downtown” Twin Peaks, CA.
Here I usually carve architectural elements.
But I also do a lot of work on-site. And on-site during the last two decades meant anywhere in the US. So I do travel. Sometimes, too, I get visits from traveling stone carvers, so-called journeymen. That is always exciting…