The Weird and The Wacky Meet

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3,000 Pound Labor of Love

HCC Is Home to Newest Marble Sculptor

                 Imagine.  Imagine is a powerful word that forces people to think about what is possible instead of what just is.  It’s not an accident that HCC student Stan Vogel begins most of his sentences with the word imagine when talking about his latest art project.

                 This isn’t to say that the snowy haired Vogel doesn’t bring his ideas to a concrete end.  Right now, when you stroll through the courtyard behind the college, you can hear a rhythmic pounding as Vogel’s chisel chips away at a block of marble.

                 “It’s sixteen cubic feet, at around 180 pounds a cubic foot,” said Vogel.  “So it’s around three thousand pounds, but [now it’s less because] I’ve been chipping away at it.”

The block is as big as a large steamer trunk.  It required a one-ton truck to haul it to Connecticut from the quarry in Vermont, said Vogel.  When asked about how much it cost to buy and bring it all the way to HCC, he brushes people off.  To him, the project is about more important things than money.

                 Chalk outlines are on every side of the block, forming a rough guide for Vogel to work from.  He asks visitors to imagine what the final piece will look like from every angle.  Immersing himself in his work, he explains what he's doing and enthralls the listener, bringing them into the world of an artist in action.

                  “I personally think it’s extravagant, but it’s kind of like a life commitment, but I don’t want to discuss the pricing of all this unless someone comes here and says they want to buy it,” Vogel noted.

                 He laughed boisterously and added, “I’m having fun.  I do this because I love it.”

                 While most people are out doing their Christmas shopping, Vogel is up early the morning after Thanksgiving to take advantage of one of the last warm days of the year.  He’s afraid that, once it gets colder, the marble will become brittle, and he doesn’t want to damage or even crack the piece.  Wearing a heavy coat, thick gloves, an apron, jeans and goggles, Vogel works at all the top corners of the block, chipping off pieces the size of small sand dollars, trying to get to the middle of the marble so he can began to form the figure he’s envisioned.

                 On the Friday morning that I visit, Vogel’s wife is there with her own coat and goggles.  She’s fully supportive of the work he’s doing, and I chat with her for more than a few minutes.  Vogel doesn’t want her quoted, though, because he wants to keep his personal life personal.

                 Vogel’s eyes lit up as he told the story of how he decided what would come out of his piece of marble.  “We were in sculpture class…the student who sits [across from me], sat herself up on the table, took off her sneaker and her sock and proceeded to continue work on a foot of her own.”

                 Vogel became very animated as he told the story of how the student was sculpting a piece out of clay, using her own foot as a model.  She was facing him, kneeling on one knee.  He said he knew that this would be a better look for the figure he was planning to carve out of his marble block.  He didn’t want to name the student, out of respect for her privacy, but he said she has modeled for him since the inspiration struck.

                  “The following Wednesday I quickly put together a clay sketch of [the student on one knee]…I am making that image of a student making – so it has an educational component – a clay foot so that it’s an imitation of her own,” he said.

                 He added he is hoping to make a realistic and life-size marble statue, with the exception of the clay foot the student is making.  “I hope to make [that part of the marble] look like a piece of clay being shaped into a foot,” Vogel said.

                 Other students involved in the art department are aware of the large project going on in the courtyard.  Courtney Smith, a fine arts major at HCC, said, “I think [Vogel’s project] is extremely ambitious, and he’s the only person I know who would take a leap from a tiny hand to a [life-size] figure.”

                 “It’s like he’s been leading up to it,” she added.

                 “My original idea for the [larger piece of marble] was [that] I thought of having a woman kneeling, on one knee, with one knee up, and her hands on top of her [raised] knee, with a large seashell in [her hands].  She’s looking up at it.  It’s almost like the opposite of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus,” noted Vogel.

                 “[Art Professor Ron Abbe] said that he thought one of the [clay] pieces I had made would make a good marble [statue].  I agreed with one exception, that the figure was looking down,” said Vogel.

                 He decided the large marble piece would still be of a figure kneeling, but it had to be “looking out at the world.”

                 He said his original clay statue of the woman holding a seashell is sitting in President Janis Hadley’s office.  “Some of the clay things I made in the spring I gave out on loan to different people in the school, and that one she’s got,” he said.

                 Vogel’s clay statues can be found around the school.  Several of the administrators, he said, have requested his pieces in their offices.

                 “[Vogel] takes pride in his work.  His other stuff is amazing,” said Smith.  “He started off in clay and [moved to marble].  It’s like starting off in charcoal and moving to oil.”

                 Various faculty members on campus are also taking notice of Vogel’s project.  Heidi Szobota, Director of the Early Childhood Laboratory School at HCC noted she has arranged to take the children out to see Vogel’s work periodically.

                 “I thought it would be good for the children to see how the artist works,” said Szobota.  “[It’s] a great learning process.”

                 The children enjoyed watching Vogel work, noted Szobota, adding that all of the children call him “Mr. Stan.”  She said he pulled out his different types of chisels and gave them an idea of what an artist does.

                 “[It’s] very process-oriented, and I am hoping to bring it back into the classroom with the kids making little sculptures,” said Szobota.

                 Vogel said he has only been sculpting in any medium, clay or marble, since February.  Before jumping into a full life-size figure, he said he started by putting over 500 hours into his first marble project, which was a small, but still life-size, statue of a hand.

                 “I wanted to be able to make something that was life-size, and with the block of marble that I had, the only thing I could think of was a hand,” he said.

                 Vogel added the hand is something he is still working on, carefully buffing and polishing the piece with special material to make it smooth.  He allowed me to touch the hand, and it is very realistic, and like all marble, cool to the touch.  Although, when he has been working on it for a while, he said it warms in his hands.

                 “[Marble] is an amazing material.  It is absolutely an amazing material,” he said..

                  Vogel said he isn’t sure when he’s going to finish his bigger marble project, but he noted he still feels he learned a lot from working on the smaller hand first.

                 “Some things I don’t think I’ll shorten, like doing detail work,” he said, laughing, and added, “two hands is going to take twice as long as one hand.”

                 Vogel is an artist who came to his craft later in life.  In 1994, he said he was laid off from his job as a programmer in information systems.  Not one to sit back and just retire, Vogel put his hand to writing plays.  He did this for five years, even managing to have more than one produced.  After that, he decided to try his hand at painting.

                 He said he taught himself how to use acrylic paint, and when he moved to the Connecticut area he ran into a HCC catalog his son had left at the house.  Then he decided to take a drawing class, which then turned into a sculpting class.

                 “My sculpting hormones kicked in, and I absolutely love it,” he said.  For spring semester, Vogel is doing an independent study project focused on the large piece of marble.

                 Vogel won’t reveal his age, but he does say he is old enough to take advantage of the free tuition for people over the age of 62 in Connecticut state colleges.

                 “[At] HCC what I’ve discovered is really a nurturing environment for an artist,” said Vogel.   “The way in which the art department is run has just encouraged me to do [this project].”

                 The process of sculpting something out of marble is something that Vogel can discuss at length.  “You have to get the piece of marble, and that may sound silly.  I’m re-reading a biography of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy, every time he made something [using a] large piece of marble there were always issues associated with actually getting the piece of marble, and I can see why.”

                 The first problem any artist who works with marble encounters is just finding a piece to sculpt, said Vogel.  Then transporting it can also be a problem.

                 “I had to get [my large marble piece] from [Vermont Quarries in Danby, Vermont], then get a trucking company to pick it up from them, the trucking company is located in Berry, Vermont, take it back to Berry to their depot, load it on a truck with other things, and then bring it down to the school.”

                 “Then I had to get riggers because nobody can pick up a three thousand block of marble,” said Vogel.

                 Even getting the marble here was a problem, noted Vogel.  “Something that weighs 3000 pounds is very hard to transport.  At first I thought I would do it myself, so I tried to rent a vehicle.”

                  Vogel said one of the workers at the quarry told him all he needed was a one-ton pick up truck.  However, he said he didn’t know how to go about getting a truck that size, so he checked all the rental agencies

                 “Nobody [had] a one-ton pick up truck.  I found a truck that had loops for securing something, but the weight would have just ripped those loops out of the walls of the truck.  It came down to just getting a trucking company to [transport it],” said Vogel.

                 Once he had the marble, Vogel said he had very definite ideas about how to go about carving it.  He said he is committed to not using power tools on this project.  He said he feels that the reason to sculpt out of marble is because it offers resistance, unlike clay.  With power tools, that would be lost.

                 Vogel found he had to get an education about different marble carving tools, including several different types of chisels.

                 “For me it was a research project.  I had to go find [the marble], pick a piece that I thought I could use, that would work, that would fit a subject that I might want to do, and then get it back here,” he said.

                  Now, the problem that remains is what will happen to the statue once it’s finished.  “It’s a problem I’m looking forward to, said Vogel.  Right now I’m happy at the end of every day’s work.”

Copyright 2005

Vogel Chipping Away

By Amanda Evans

Date: 12/14/05

The First Marble Hand