The Art of the Shape
By K. Schipper
NASHVILLE, Ind. – William Galloway gets up most mornings to spend a day cutting stone, often to exacting specifications for high-end clients.
And he’s not a countertop fabricator.
Click photo to enlargeThe owner of Nashville-based Galloway Stone Carving and Angelo Stone Company in Bedford, Ind., is a stone carver and sculptor who’s worked in the limestone of his native state for decades. Primarily self-taught, he’s often called in to replicate architectural elements from projects under renovation.
More recently, though, he’s branched out into doing more sculpture. He hopes that, going forward, he’s able to translate the stone-carving experience into video to share what he knows with the population at large.
Endurability
Galloway says he felt the call of shaping stone at an early age.
“I got started in it partly because it is so difficult and there aren’t a lot of people in it,” he says. “But, I also like its endurability.
“Some of our oldest artifacts are carved in stone. The languages of the people who made them aren’t spoken any more – we don’t even know what they sounded like – but the stone pieces are still there.”
However, sculpting in stone isn’t a skill that’s taught in colleges, and Galloway left his higher education unfinished.
“It’s not a skill you can learn in four years, and often not even seven,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense to try to teach it in college.”
Click image for gallery
He adds that it’s also not a field where jobs are plentiful, especially in the architectural field. And, for those who want to reach the public, not only do galleries often shy away from it, but buyers don’t always know where to look for sculpted stone – let alone how to get it home.
Galloway says he was lucky in the fact that when he began to explore learning to carve stone in the 1980s, there was a rebirth of interest in stone carving, fueled by a big rebuilding effort at the National Cathedral in Washington.
“I happened to be lucky enough to get in with a couple of the older carvers who came out of retirement or who had done carpentry just to stay busy,” he says. “They were brought back to start the renovation of that building.”
Even so, he says there’s only so much of the craft that can actually be taught.
“There are the mechanical skills, the physical skills, the ability to use the tools in your hands to make a straight line or a curve,” Galloway says. “Those are the kinds of things I learned from the men at the mills. The artistic ability – the ability to see in 3-D and in reverse – is something you either have or you don’t. I don’t think you can develop it that much.”
Today, he explains that he faces different sorts of challenges. Probably the biggest is getting on the same page with a client.
