ON SOAPSTONE CARVING
by Robert Runté

I'm Not boring You, Am I?
Number 9, 1995

About a year ago, West Coast artist Stephanie Johanson mentioned in passing that she had given an informal workshop on soap stone carving at NorWesCon. I confessed to a vague interest in the subject and suggested that such a workshop might be an appropriate activity for the big Clam Shoot scheduled in May. In due course, Stephanie, myself and about a dozen others found ourselves on a beach in Tofino (a resort town on north Vancouver island) with a pile of soapstone and a variety of carving tools at our disposal. Stephanie opened her talk with the most important instruction of her workshop: "Here, carve something."

Fifteen seconds into this activity I realized several key truths: (1) I have no artistic talent, (2) I'm not what you'd call "handy" with tools, and (3) I was about to damage a valuable piece of soapstone. These facts were particularly brought home in comparison with the 10 year old next to me who managed to hack out a reasonable likeness of a Thunderbird (the totem, not the car) from his lump of rock, while mine slowly turned into --- a slightly smaller lump of rock.

Fortunately, Stephanie's husband, Karl Johanson, interceded at this point. (Karl is best known as co-editor of Under the Ozone Hole, Canada's national sf newsletter.) Karl is a profoundly sensible person, and has the sort of insight that often allows him to change people's lives with a single remark. On a previous occasion, for example, he had expounded the Zen of Comedy: "Nothing so bad can happen to you that it won't make a funny story after." Now that was something I had been trying to express for years, but never quite put my finger on. Happiness is largely learning not to sweat the small stuff, and keeping things in appropriate perspective is realizing that in the long run, it is all mostly small stuff. Situations that others are likely to find frustrating or annoying plunge Karl and Stephanie into gales of laughter as they realize how this will all sound later when (following suitable editing) it will become part of their story repertoire. I really like these people! Listening to their litany of comic misadventures trying to reach Edmonton in a broken down car at ConText'91, for example, I took a deep breath and began reexamining my own life. My struggles with my dissertation, job search, romantic life, and most of the things that had been weighing on me at that time were suddenly revealed to be pretty funny if you chose to view them that way. I like to think that that's a lesson I've since retained.

In any event, on this occasion Karl started talking about how he had grown up knowing he couldn't draw (due, no doubt to some traumatic experiences in elementary school with teachers who despaired at his purple cows and green people - Karl is color blind). While demonstrating how to draw stickmen to a friend's three year old, however, Karl had recently realized that he could draw, if only at the level of a three year old. "Our trouble is, we've gotten so used to being good at things by our age, that anything that requires us to start over from scratch just seems impossible. But the truth is, everybody has to start from scratch on something like this, whether we start when we're three or 43. The trick is to give yourself permission to be awful at first."

Well, duh! Expecting to be able to pick up a rock and instantly transform it into Michelangelo's David my first try was, in retrospect, just a little naive. What was I thinking? Of course I was going to be rotten first time out. "And" --insert mental picture of Saturday Night's Stuart Smalley-- "that's okay."

Nevertheless, I still found myself hesitating. Giving myself permission to be rotten turned out to be harder than I had anticipated. In the process of learning I would still be destroying a perfectly decent piece of soapstone. Echoes of my mother and older siblings yelling "Don't touch it, you'll break it!" reverberated in my head as I contemplated my rock. My childhood reputation as someone who destroyed anything he touched wasn't entirely unfounded, though admittedly I had not previously thought the prohibition applied to rocks. As I prodded my stone speculatively, it occurred to me that permission to be a beginner was all very fine, but what if I never got better? What if I not only lacked skills, but talent as well? As I recalled, art class had never been one of my strong suits. And, bottom line - subconsciously at least, I was still afraid of someone seeing me make a fool of myself.

Then Stephanie added, "Just use the first stone as a practice piece, to learn about the tools, to see what each tool does, how they differ, how the stone responds, and that sort of thing."

Well, that is an entirely different matter, then! Carving an official "practice stone" meant it didn't have to look like anything, and I could just hack away for the sake of hacking. I vaguely recalled hearing that in Japanese tradition, apprentice potters spent the first ten years just kneeing the clay, and wouldn't actually get to throw their first pot until well into their second decade with the master. Far be it from me to second guess a thousand years of tradition (even if it was a tradition I had to borrow from another culture) and think that I should attempt to produce a recognizable shape anytime soon. I set to work gouging and carving, practicing with the different tools Stephanie had brought.

At the end of that session on the beach I had (1) an "abstract" carving that seemed vaguely reminiscent of some Aztec pieces I've seen; (2) a great deal more knowledge about how soapstone was worked (Stephanie having answered a stream of questions throughout, offering advice as we completed one step and were ready for the next); and (3) a desire to try this again on my own.

On returning to Lethbridge I was disappointed to learn there were no rock stores in town, and so had to wait until my next trip to Calgary to obtain a supply of suitable stone and some tools. The local Canadian Tire (non-Canadians read, "hardware store") supplied the rest of my tool needs, and the Lethbridge Public Library (actually a rather good library for the size city) had a number of excellent books on the topic. Altogether I sunk about $200 (Americans read "$110") into tools, supplies, and handbooks to get started, but that's not much as most hobbies go.

A couple of points worth mentioning that I learned from my reading.

First, what I am doing is carving, not sculpture. Sculpting is done with chisels, whereas I'm working the stone with various rasps and blades. If I ever get good at carving, I might try sculpting some day, but this involves using both harder stones and a more complex chiseling action than what I'm up for now.

Second, a couple of the books mentioned that the dust from some of the softer stones is soluble in your lungs, so it is probably a really good idea to wear a filter mask as well as the mandatory goggles. (Regular glasses are not good enough to protect you from flying chips because while the stone fragments won't likely penetrate the lenses, they can go around the sides - goggles protect you from ricochets from the edges or beneath.) With goggles and filter mask I look a bit like something from Mars, but why take chances?

By the same token, I prefer to work outside on my deck where the infamous Lethbridge wind can take away the dust. If you read the fine print in your vacuum cleaner manual, you'll probably find that it says the one thing you can't vacuum up with it is cement or stone dust. (Well, it will pick up the dust, but destroy your machine when said dust goes right through into the motor.) I also don't care for the thought of all that dust I carefully avoided breathing in while I was working the stone drifting lazily through my house, free to get at me later as I sleep. Better to works outside and be done with it. I'm not sure what I will do in winter yet, but figure I will rig some sort of stovetop-style vent & fan for whatever room gets designated as my workshop.

Third, keep it simple. Every book I read repeated over and over again, keep the design simple. So naturally, I ended up trying to carve an extremely detailed tableau . . . . Well, every time I try to write a short story it turns into a novel, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised I'm having the same trouble here. (And, come to think of it, maybe that's what's wrong with my stories too.)

Fourth, I found one book (and only one) that claimed you could fire soapstone in an ordinary stove to increase its hardness to the level of, say, marble. I haven't tried this yet, but if it works it will mean that once I have finished a carving, it should be possible to make it hard enough not to scratch easily.

Finally, there were any number of other tips that most folks probably already know from other applications. I was never the handy type, so have never had occasion to, for example, use a rasp before, and so didn't know you were only supposed to cut in one direction. (The backstroke, I'm told, wrecks the rasp.) I still haven't worked out the difference between a rasp and a file, but in any event, this working-with-your-hands thing is fun, once I got over the sure knowledge that I am unable to work with my hands.

Now, between teaching summer school, various research projects, and other commitments, I haven't had much opportunity to carve very often, but when I do, I find it marvelously relaxing. Well, more than relaxing, really. "Meditative" probably comes closest to describing it. Sitting there making repetitive motions that slowly but visibly change a stone into something vaguely recognizable forces me to pause in my otherwise hectic schedule and reflect on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. There is almost a spiritual aspect to carving. So even if the product leaves something to be desired, the process is itself highly worthwhile.

The process is also slightly mystical. I have no idea where the designs that emerge came from. There are two schools of thought in rock carving/sculpture -those that start with a vision and impose it on the rock, and those that start with the rock and see what emerges. Since I cannot draw a straight line, and since drafting is one of the few school subjects in which I was spectacularly bad (how the hell should I know what this object would look like from the other side?), planning what I am going to carve just seems more trouble than it's worth.

So I just start hacking away, and all of a sudden, this piece over here looks a bit like a rabbit, and if that bit over there was more rounded it might be a hunter's head, and this bit here - if I cut a groove here around this end like so,- might look like the sleeve of the hunter's parka. The rock sort of tells you what to do.

Again it was Karl that explained this to me, though at another time and in a entirely different context. Pattern recognition is one of the things hardwired into our brains. That's why people are always seeing conspiracies where there aren't any. Normal incompetence explains 99% of what goes wrong in our lives and organizations, but our brains are always seeking patterns, and so occasionally projects one that isn't there. Which is why, of course, we see faces in clouds, and rabbit hunters in irregular lumps of stone.

(One book recommended that if you were handed a cube of stone, as some hobby shops are wont to supply, lop off chunks at random until it is a sufficiently irregular shape that you could see something to pursue.)

I quickly realized, however, that I had one huge factor working in my favor. As an sf type, I really can't screw this up too badly. Say I start to carve a cow, and it comes out looking only vaguely cow-like. Well, then I simply tell folks it isn't a cow, and was never intended to be a cow, but is in fact a "bovoid from the planet Zor." Let's see someone tell me that it doesn't look exactly like a Zorian boviod. Now, they may well think it is ugly, but hey, those Zorian boviods are pretty ugly, aren't they? You know?

At the moment I am working on a piece with three figures: on one side is an Egyptian-style crocodile god seated on his thrown. On the other a jabberwocky has caught and is holding a struggling mugwamp. (See what I mean? It may have started out an Inuit hunter holding a rabbit, but we are definitely into Jabberwocky and mugwamp territory now!) I have no idea if this will work out, and such a complex piece clearly violates every piece of advice about keeping the carving simple that I've read, but what the hey, it's what I saw (well, more or less) in the rock.

What any of this says about my subconscious, I refuse to speculate.

Another wholly unexpected benefit of taking up this hobby is that I have suddenly become an appreciative consumer of sculpture. Now whenever I walk into a gallery or public building, the first thing that catches my eye is the sculpture. Like anyone else, I'd always been vaguely aware of the more monumental pieces in lobbies and so on, but I can't ever remember there being quite so much of it before. And I am seeing it with entirely different eyes now that I have some notion of what kind, and how much, work goes into a piece.

This has also turned out to be a good conversation starter. Well, okay, I admit that it probably ranks right up there with baby stories and home movies of one's summer vacation, but at least people kind of get what it is; whereas half the time when I tried to explain about collecting rubber stamps I would either get blank stares or weird sexual innuendo in response to the word "rubber". Here, as soon as you mention to someone that you're into it, out come their half dozen Inuit, or Mexican, or Chinese carvings from their forgotten nooks and crannies in the bookcase. (I'll say this for the sf community, they buy a lot of original art.) Even if the listener is not a collector themselves, or can't quite share my enthusiasm, they are at least pleased to see me so excited. As a sociologist in these times, and as an educator watching the provincial government dismantle the public school system, talking to me can be a very depressing experience . . . . "For god sakes, Doris, don't get him started again or we'll all want to kill ourselves by the end of the party! Ask him about his damn sculpture again."

"'Carving', you mean. See, 'sculpture' refers specifically to the use of chisels-"

"Say, Robert, would you like to see the video from our vacation?"