The basic tools are the
same as the ancients. It's hard in just
getting a list of tools-- how does that translate into
a beautiful work of art? Working by hand,
everything slows down, and you can think
about what you're doing while you're doing it. You start roughing out,
taking the bulk of the weight off with a point chisel,
which concentrates all the force of your
blow at one point and bursts the stone away. Your next step
after that, having removed the bulk
of the material, is to model your form
with the tooth chisel. A tooth chisel is
basically a comb, and you use it to
chisel to model form, while at the same time
remove stone fairly quickly. Something to remember
about marble carving, it's very tactile, the way
the stone bursts from a point chisel, or the way your
tooth chisel just kind of swims through the stone. It's a hard material, but you
can jump into a piece of space with these tools. If you cut at a very
oblique angle to the stone you can get a finer surface. If you are forcing the tool
straight into the stone, you can get quite a
different texture. The rasp is just a whole row
of fine little teeth, cut into a piece of metal,
and you can then just rub or grind this tool into
the stone, removing material and really refine a plane. Depending on how
you use the tool you can really
emphasize certain forms. If you kind of lose your ego,
and just flow into the stone through your tools,
there's no end of possibilities of what you
can do inside that space.