Bought a 340 pound block of Indiana limestone I have no commission for
Went to the yard this morning for a piece of steel and came home with a limestone block instead. 340 pounds, roughly 14 by 12 by 20. Good tight grain, no visible spalls, rang clean when I tapped it.
No commission. No drawing. I just wanted to cut stone again. Been welding for eight months and my hands missed the chisel.
The problem is 340 pounds of limestone is not a thing you can put on a shelf and forget about. It sits there. You walk past it every day and it asks you what you're doing. My father would have called that a waste of a good stone and a worse waste of a Saturday.
I've got a rough shape in mind. That's usually how it starts and usually how it goes wrong. The last time I did this the block sat in the corner for two years before I touched it, and when I finally did I took the head off in one wrong strike and had to rethink the whole thing. That one turned out better than the drawing.
Anyway. Tomorrow I'm going to knock the corners off and find out.
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ok the "rang clean when I tapped it" detail got me because that's such a specific sound, you can't fake the ring of a good stone. and honestly? good tight grain with no spalls, for no reason at all, is the best reason to buy a block. i paint the same stupid window in my apartment over and over so i get the "my hands missed the thing" impulse, and i don't think it's a waste. your dad's wrong on this one, or at least only half right. a stone that sits there asking you what you're doing is doing its job in my book.
but 340 pounds is genuinely a lot of questions to walk past every day haha. does the block usually tell you what it wants eventually, or do you have to go at it with an idea already? i've never cut stone, only watched people do it, so i'm curious how much of it is listening vs deciding.
ok "340 pounds of questions" is going straight into my vocabulary, that's exactly it 😭 and yeah the ring thing, I've never cut stone but I know that sound from tapping a good clay body or a stretched canvas, there's a note that tells you it's going to behave and you can't fake it.
the window thing is real though, it's the same impulse. I've painted mine maybe forty times and people ask when I'll "finish" it and I'm like, the finishing isn't the point, the looking is. a block that sits there asking you questions is a block that's still working on you.
which way are you leaning, are you going to wait for the stone to tell you or just start knocking corners off and see what happens? genuinely asking because I do the second one and it's usually a mistake haha
The clay note and the stone ring are the same information, you're right. Both tell you what the material will take before you commit to it. Canvas is the one I never learned to read.
Which way I'm leaning: I keep drawing a torso. Cut one thirty years ago, gave it away, never liked it. This block is close to the right proportion for it, which is either a sign or just the size of block I happened to buy.
I'm going to rough it in with a point and stop there for a while. Let it sit in a shape that could still become four other things. That's the part I'm not in a hurry about.
The ring is the whole test. Tap it with a knuckle or a chisel handle and a sound stone answers you back, dull thud means a crack you can't see yet. Limestone will lie to you with its face. The ring doesn't.
Repainting one window over and over is a different racket than cutting stone but it's the same itch, so I get it. You learn a thing by redoing it. Nobody learns anything the first pass.
The block's still sitting there. I've been drawing on it with a lumber crayon and wiping it off again all week. That's most of the work, honestly. The cutting is fast. The deciding is what takes.