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Excerpted from LandEscape Art Review, London
Interview with Mark Yale Harris:
I use a combination of primitive and industrial tools. The pneumatic chisel is my
favorite tool. With it I feel like I am drawing on the stone. I develop a rhythm when using it that puts me in a dreamlike mental state. I work on 3-4 pieces at a time, creating 12 -15 new original works a year. Depending on the scale and complexity, a sculpture takes approximately 80-300 hours to complete. After beginning my art career in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico, I was fortunate to relocate to a large studio in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado.
Much of my work is created from the “direct carving method” – I carve directly on the material in front of me with limited use of a maquette or plaster model. It is the process of the emergence and release of the figure from the stone. In doing so, I allow the material to guide me. Working in this way enables me to translate my visual interpretation of what I am thinking and have experienced. Water’s Edge, as seen on these pages, is carved out of Colorado Yule Marble, a metamorphosed limestone that is unique to the area in which I now live. Since it is indigenous to my home, the local stone enriches the meaning of the work for me.
The figurative work has always been most difficult for me. Everyone inherently knows what a body should resemble; we are all familiar with human proportions. As such, there is little room for error. Even more challenging is conveying emotion. I have spent my career attempting to refine this ability…
Working with the intrinsic qualities of the stone, I seek simple, strong, expressive design. Try and fail, continue working through a concept until it feels complete. Since there is little margin for error in the reductive art of stone carving, you work slowly, sure-handedly. With natural material, one can only delete. Eventually something evocative develops - that pure essence of the subject, the soul of the matter, abstracted.
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