Stone Carving with Maestro Tazzioli

The last two weeks I spent in Florence in the middle of the city, in a studio in the basement of a palazzo, making stuff with clay. For the next two weeks, I’m about as far from the city as you can get. The view from the studio where I’m working is over a forested valley where there is no visible trace of human habitation. The studio itself is a located in the back of a tile warehouse down a dirt drive-way off of a narrow, two lane, curvy mountain road. And, I’ll be carving stone. Marble mostly, I think. Nice, hard rock. So, basically, I’m in paradise. Not that I didn’t like the city. In my dream life, I have an art commune in the city and an art commune in the country, and I travel back and forth – with my minions and personal chef.

I’m here to spend a couple of weeks doing an apprenticeship with Dario Tazzioli as well as teaching a landscape painting workshop at the local cultural center for a couple of Saturdays. Dario is going to be giving me some stone carving exercises to work on. And, I may get to help him out with some of his own work. Right now, he’s carving a bunch of huge, oak corbels. (So, he does wood carving too, but mostly stone carving.) There are also a number of other projects in progress scattered around the studio.

I’m a little short on pictures at present. I’ve been sort of busy and absorbed in working and have been forgetting to take pictures or else forgetting to bring my phone!

More to come…