| Custom made objects are not common today. Our economy is based on manufacturing large quantities of things, with sales and distribution forces to attract and handle the customer. The benefit, and the reason we accept mass production, is that the product is more available and less expensive. But that is also why “cheap” has become a derogatory term
It is still possible to care, today—care about who one is, what one does and how one does it. It seems to me that anyone making a unique object now does so because they care about its rightness and not about how quickly or easily such a thing can be made. The result is, or should be, a thing of beauty, satisfying both the maker and the patron.
I opened my business in 1979, five years after receiving a BA in studio art from Middlebury College. My experience as a stone carver began much earlier, with an apprenticeship at age 16, a summer job and eventually full time work in a stonecarving shop founded in 1705. The methods are simple: letters are brush painted on paper or stone, freehand. Hammer, chisel, hand and eye take care of the carving. The results can be left natural or accentuated with color. Scale can range from jewel size to monumental, for placement on a coffee table to fifty feet up on a building facade.
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