Carving Roots
I was born and raised in a small gold mining community by the name of Bralorne, which is located in the Coast Mountains about a two hour drive West of Lillooet, and four hours North of Vancouver. The town was small, but it was the largest gold producing mine in B.C. From 1934 – 1971. At it's peek, the mine was very deep, at over a mile, and produced a 50 lb. gold brick worth approximately 50,000.00 dollars once/week. The mine provided continuous employment for a great number of men and their families right through the Great Depression and WW II. It was a company town, and during the summer in my teens I worked for the mine. If you lived there, you had an automatic job if you wanted it. I started as a laborer working in the mine mill where the gold ore was processed and the gold bricks were poured. One of my jobs included carrying the newly poured brick from the refinery back to the vault. I can still feel how heavy it was! While attending University in Vancouver, I would come home and work in the mine for four months in the summertime. My job was to drive one of the trains that hauled the ore out of the mine. When I graduated from UBC I relocated, and the mine eventually shut down in 1971, not due to a lack of gold, but because of the depth of the mine, it was no longer profitable to operate. Today Bralorne is a ghost town and only about one-hundred and fifty residents live in the general area.
My family has always had a piece of property on Gunn Lake (20 Km. from Bralorne). I still own it today and this is where I have my studio. My first attempt at carving stone was in 1974 when I tackled a small piece of soapstone. I was amazed at how easily it carved, and how pleasurable it was to do. I gradually moved up to bigger pieces, using some of the stone which is endemic to the area. One such stone is serpentine, which is very dense, heavy and a dark green in colour, looking similar to jade. This stone actually came out of the mine and was considered waste rock, so it is quite abundant in the area. It was found flanking the quartz seams which carried the gold flakes. These seams were typically 6-15' wide, and hundreds of feet high and long. The whole seam would be mined out by a process of drilling and blasting with dynamite. A certain amount of serpentine was removed as well, inevitably, and piled in waste dumps outside. The hardness of this stone is about a “6” on a scale of 1-10, and quite difficult to work. Because of this, I don't usually carve it anymore, since it is also very heavy. I prefer the softer and lighter stones now, like soapstone, pyrophylite and alabaster, which are, not available locally, so I purchase them from a distributor in Vancouver who brings them in from all over the world. South America and Africa have some of the best quality.
Today, I spend six months of the year at Gunn Lake from May to October where I have my studio and do all my carving. It's a very dusty process and has to be done outside. I spend the winters at the Coast. The material can be heavy, so I try to keep the pieces under about 40 lbs now. I prefer abstract work, which is heavily influenced by the mountains, lakes, rivers, and forests of the area, but I also do a few representational pieces, mainly animals. My inspiration comes from the surrounding Nature, and I don't plan an abstract piece at all, preferring to “go with the flow”. The animals and figures are researched and drawn out first, so as to keep everything to scale. I use power tools with diamond -tipped wheels to rough out, a hammer and chisel, a pencil grinder for the fine work, and then hand tools and sandpaper to finish them. The final work is waxed and polished.