Carving Yule Marble since the 1970’s // Co-Founder Marble/Marble

Having an interest in stone cutting brought my attention to the supreme stone carvers; the Egyptians, who felt that craftsmen and artists belong in the same category. I would slant heavily towards the skill of adapting unique techniques to cut stone. The use of diamond abrasives, pneumatic and hydraulic tools, huge core drills, and wire saws keep me engaged. The technology involved enhances the delicate way stone has to be treated.

The beautiful green marble are small amounts of the mineral serpentine. Through contact metamorphism olivine reacted with ground water to form serpentine. This is a very rare stone not normally quarried in the white Colorado marble that's currently being mined in abundance. The gray stone is a form of very hard quartz. The white marble is calcium carbonate. This series of marble sculptures are influenced by the beauty of the universe and nature.

Abstract forms are a real challenge. Balance and volume and the tools that help to form and sculpt, the beauty of the stone; all blend together to make a rough stone transform again and again until the creative process is finally satisfied. Metamorphic process's have been happening to this stone for billions of years. My hands are now part of these changes. I owe a debt to the miners quarrying the stone, and the geological formations that blessed me with such beautiful stone.

The spirit of the stone is the essence. The smell of the dust, the vibration of the machines, the rhythm of the chisel, imagination and physics and geometry, all of these things combine with tenacity to birth these forms. The day at work sculpting is not as glorious as one might imagine. It may be running a crane to move the stone. Or operating tools like diamond wire saws, chain saws and core drills. Various grinders with every kind of abrasive imaginable become my hands. The marble dust is inches thick and requires dust respirators, ear and eye protection. The sculptor is covered in white dust nearly every day.

I am honored to create this work. Humans seem to be helping the entropy of matter. I would like to think these sculptures are a small interlude to be enjoyed in the history of these stones.

Gregory Tonozzi