Karl with Child’s Haven
In 2000, a year after retiring as a history professor, Karl took a stone-sculpting class. This was enough to make an enthusiast of him. Until his retirement from sculpting in 2015, he completed about two hundred pieces. While he carved a few from soapstone and alabaster and more from marble, he shaped most from harder stones such as granite, basalt, rhyolite, dunite, gneiss, schist, and quartzite. Some of his pieces are figurative; more, evocative. They vary from purely decorative to graceful utilitarian. They range in weight from under a pound to over a ton.
Karl’s enthusiasm for stone sculpting had two sources. The first was his long interest in rocks and minerals. Decades of outings to the shores, mountains, gorges, and deserts of western North America had acquainted him with the ways in which erosion, earthquakes, and weathering shape rocky terrains. In collecting many of the stones that he used in his sculptures, he enjoyed learning how subterranean geological processes create and transform rocks and minerals in depths with high temperatures and pressures. And he felt a special, unusual pleasure from knowing the path of each finding that he sculpted from its particular terrain to his carving table.
The second source for his enthusiasm was the work itself. There was, he found, something very satisfying about deploying an ever more diverse array of tools and techniques to shape stones, especially hard stones. Cutting frets with diamond blades, breaking them off with hammer and chisel, smoothing the broken surfaces with diamond cup wheels, etc., etc.—the rhythms of the work were marvelous particularly when he tried something new (and it went well!). As the sculpture neared its final form, the difficult challenge emerged of creating a base that will, at once, stabilize and complement the piece. Success, here, was a heady reward for all the preceding activity. See, for instance, Into the Wind (2007), Flexion II (2008), Together (2009), and Young at Heart (2010).