For my 33rd birthday, I was taken to a stonecarving day in
Kennington, south London. I had my doubts about it, largely because
most of my artistic endeavours have been on hold for well over a year,
but I managed to come up with a vague idea for a 'blobby cat' that
would be fairly easy to carve. One of these days, I'll stick up a
sketch of my original idea, for comparason, because the end result was
far better and far more detailed than I'd ever imagined it would be.
Bizarrely, in the class of 5 people, mine was finished first (three
hours before the end of the class), and the tutor loved it, saying
"Once in a while, when I'm teaching this class, I see a piece that
makes me think 'I want that!'".
He is pretty darned cute, and is now called 'Sleepy Cat' rather than
'Blobby Cat'. Considering I started out with a squared off block of
stone, I chipped away a hell of a lot to reveal this cat... and, as a
result, my hands ended up quite blistered (one on my right palm, one on
my right index finger (not sure how that one happened!) and one on my
left thumb, with the abiding impression that I wasn't far away from
several more on my left hand.
After I stopped work on Sleepy Cat (both because I felt I didn't
want to do any more and because the tutor considered it 'finished'), I
started attacking another block of stone (the offcut from my original,
larger piece) with the intention of creating a pedastal for the cat...
But once I started working on it, having drawn the outline of the
irregular pedastal I wanted, something very strange happened. No matter
how I looked at the stone, nor from what angle, I could see that the
stone contained something other than a pedastal... It took me quite a
while to figure out what it was, but eventually I saw a frog.
Considering the battering my hands had already taken, and that we had
less than three hours of class left, I decided to stop work on the
pedastal/frog, and to be satisfied with Sleepy Cat.
