Chat Tacheté

 Sculpture by Ellen Woodbury

13 x 7 ½ x 7 ½ inches

Black Campan Marble on Granite

Completed June, 2012

This sculpture was inspired by my tuxedo cat, Moonface.  She had several health challenges this year and was uncommonly brave and trusting throughout the long ordeal.  The title is French for Speckled Cat, and though Moonface is neither  speckled nor French, the lively stone fits her playful personality.  The marble is French.

I carved Campan Verde, the green and white cousin of Black Campan, last summer when I made The Last Dinosaur (leatherback sea turtle).  Both of these marbles come from the same quarry in France and have the same graphic pattern but very different colors.  This is a pretty wild concept if you think abut it.  What geologic factors caused both kinds of marble to be speckled in the same way, but with different colored spots and binders?

I found Black Campan much trickier to carve than Verde.  Think of it as a block made of mortar and bricks where the black matrix is the mortar and the pink and white spots are the bricks.  When cut, it fragments in any direction and the shards are very sharp, like broken glass.  Edges are quite susceptible to chipping and have to be handled with great care.  That said, the color is worth the effort.  The detail does not emerge until sanding is well under way—around 220 grit you begin to see variations in the pink and white spots.  By 2,000 grit there are hints of green and yellow, with reddish veins running through the colored spots. 

My next sculpture is a barn owl carved from a dark yellow marble from Portugal, a new stone for me.  I am filing and sanding the piece right now, and I do think it will turn out well!  I love this stage of the process where all the questions are answered and the beauty in the stone is revealed.  I'll have it ready for you in a couple of weeks!


All images and text Copyright 2012 by Ellen Woodbury
Photo by Mel Schockner