Scallop
Baja Onyx (Mexico)
16"
Carved from a single boulder, the concept was to largely remove the "softer", brownish stone and result in a bowl of the harder, translucent, milky green material. Weeks into the process, using small spinning abrasive burrs, in deference to the fragility of the stone, things were going well. The skin was getting thinner and thinner and more and more translucent.
Then, in the blink of an eye, the softer, siltier material gave way. Working in a purely subtractive media, one learns to "embrace" the whisperings of the stone with respect to "what it wants to be". Going forward being the only option, I continued to chase the browner material away, until only traces remained. The resultant fragile, organic, scalloped shape is as much of a creation of mother nature as of the artist.