Headstones

Lettering is one of the harder skills of the sculpting disciplines to perfect. It is also one of the most rewarding. The skills required start with the work on paper to produced a design showing eleganlty spaced and weighted letters and words.

The quality of stone must be the highest as flaws and breaks cause distortions of the forms. Lettering would normally be cut from perfectly flat and polished stone. However it has been the organic nature of my work combining the polished sculpted forms alongside the natural texture and shape of a stone that has drawn people to commission me. Whilst perfectly happy working on machined shapes and surfaces I have made it a speciality of mine to cut letters on a riven surface. In my headstone work I have often been asked to produce pieces that have a natural shape. Carefully chosen they echo the tradition forms without looking man-made.

 

 

There are two new challanges when working with natural shapes and surfaces. The first is with the layout.  Within a square, recatngle or even a circle there is mathamatical way of placing/centring the letters. On a natural piece the placing is more instinctive and you find the placement that feels right. Second is that the uneven surface bends and distorts the outlines of the letters and you must compensate for this.

 

Even with apparantly formal designs natural anomolies in the stone can play a welcome part in the design. The stone below, in memorial of an artist, was inspred by the artist’s palette. The cicular hole making this otherwise traditional design highly contempory. The purple slate of north wales brought an increasingly rare colour to the palette.  The natural ‘inclusions’ seen as pale green blotches in middle/right of the lettering (which might normally have caused me to seek another stone) were welcomed by the family as ‘paint on his palette’.

 

All the lettering seen above is of the sort described as V-Cut (look out for the article on cutting letters in the blog roll). This technique cuts the letters into the stone and produces, the distinctive, two faces joined at the bottom in a V shaped incision into the stone. This produces a strong light and shade contrast between the two faces.

Senn below is an example of ‘Bass Relief’ lettering where the letter shape remains whilst the surrounding stone is removed. The panel below is one of 10 produced in conjunction with Ryan Morley of Bird and Bee for the Sheaf Valley River Walk. (More details of this in the ‘Commissions Page’