When Michelangelo unveiled his immortal sculpture of David in 1504, someone asked him, “How in God’s name could you have achieved a masterpiece like this from a crude slab of marble?” “It was easy,” Michelangelo replied. “All I did was chip away everything that didn’t look like David.”
There is a difference between the act of modelling and the act of carving. Although both methods result in a sculpture when finished. In modelling, the artist builds the piece from the ground up by adding clay or wax to create the image. If a mistake happens, modelling material can be added. When carving, the redundant outer material is peeled away to get to the subject hidden inside. Any mistake would be hard to correct.
Studying the life and art of Michelangelo, you read: “…. he set to work in search of the figure he had already seen in his mind’s eye lying locked inside, wrestling his superb statue of the young David from the old form of the block of marble called Giant,” and, “in Michelangelo’s mind David seems to be battling to free himself from the rough-hewn stone, pressing out from within, as the force that drives through it flexes his muscles to the breaking point.” Michelangelo made a small model in stucco before carving and then enlarged it in proportion to the marble block he used for the statue. This part of the work is highly technical and less creative but is the only way to avoid mistakes.
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On vacation in the 1970s, driving through Tirol in Austria, on a secondary road winding through the mountains, Bruno bought several silly little carvings depicting elves’ heads. They were about two by four inches in size, dirt cheap - about a buck each in an obscure souvenir shop. They were fashioned from slices of pine boughs, taking advantage of the irregularities - the little bumps, knots and broken-off branches in the wood. It was more a craft than art, but they still intrigued Bruno who wondered if the little faces could be used as decorations when carving bigger wood items. The following January, Bruno was throwing out the family Christmas tree. It occurred to him he could carve its trunk into a walking stick. He cut the branches off , trimmed the tree trunk to a proper length and carved seven troll faces along its length.
Just like the carver of souvenirs from Tirol, he let himself be guided by the imperfections in the wood. The larger knot of a side branch would become a nose, the small knot- a wart on the cheek. For the beard, he would retain the bark while peeling around it, and with a few cuts by a sharp knife, he cut the eyes and the mouth. The mouths were the key. They gave the faces character. There was no need to make a model first as the faces were caricatures and did not have to portray anyone in particular. Carving a walking stick proved to be risky business. He was not working with an inert block of material, but rather whittling an unwieldy long piece of wood he held by one hand and carved by the other. It takes just one slip of a chisel to have an accident. Bruno’s wife Elsa soon became tired of driving him, bleeding profusely, to emergency rooms at night.
Soon afterwards, Elsa noticed that a store with drafting supplies, tools, and copying services was selling small cuboids of carving soapstone. She bought one and suggested to Bruno that soapstone might be much safer, because it is heavy, does not wobble and can be easily fastened down. The carver can use both hands to do the work. Natives in Africa, Australia and Inuit in Canada carve soapstone for practical items such as plates or oil lamps, but also make decorative pieces or figurines. It was the kind of challenge Bruno found difficult to resist. He was eager to start, but the block of stone Elsa brought him was just a regular cuboid, and unlike wood sticks, had no imperfections formenting his imagination. He tried to picture what was hiding in the soapstone block. He settled on an idea to carve the head of a young girl- his daughter’s.
There used to be a cartoon showing a model sitting on a stool, a sculptor having an enormous block of marble in front of him, holding a hammer and a chisel ready to go, and asking the model to smile. How silly! Yet on this occasion, Bruno did just that. It was a dismal failure. He made an indentation to one side of the cuboid where he guessed an eye would be, but he quickly realized it was not the way to make portraits. It had to be a simple design, minimalistic in appearance, more stylized than a realistic rendition of a human’s head, and it had to be carved from the size of the soapstone he had. He came up with a stylized parrot cracking a nut with its beak. It turned out nicely, except for a little indentation in one of the parrot’s wings where his daughter’s eye would have been.
Bruno was hooked.
He started studying books about Northern Indigenous art for ideas, and he carved three pieces of various sizes that were Inuit in style and design. But it felt improper and fake because he was not an Inuit.
He learned how to work the soapstone, recognized the intricacies and limitations of the medium, and wanted to do something different even if it were technically difficult. Bruno set out to make his creations look light, even ephemeral. This led him to study the art of the Italian Renaissance, the golden age of sculptors. He could not try to match the mastery of Michelangelo or Bernini, who carved paper-thin leaves or transparent-looking draperies from blocks of marble. Soapstone could not be made to look light. It is softer and easily breaks if it is too thin. That is why it is so suitable for carving simplified animals or persons in heavy parkas, more rounded than tall and thin.
Bruno’s artistic work has always been dictated by the materials and techniques he had access to; he would subordinate the result to the material he was using rather than trying to bend materials or techniques to his will. He is a freewheeler and does not want to model his carvings in clay first and then transfer those using callipers and such. This leads to perfectionism and realism, and in his opinion, stolidity. It is difficult to make the finished sculpture look spontaneous. Only a few geniuses could avoid it, and Bruno is not one. It takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless!
When Bruno obtains a piece of soapstone, he lets it sit and waits for inspiration. It can take a long time, even years. Then he lets go, makes mistakes and causes imperfections happily. There were failures, but sculptures of a snake emerging from the rock and an ant with long, slender legs, an oversized head and antennae turned out nicely and are original. 
Self-training promotes individuality, although sometimes one spends too much time inventing things that have already been figured out. Bruno hit the wall with the finishing. He could not figure out how to achieve the shine and natural sheen of pieces carved by Inuit and other native carvers. He probably should have taken courses to learn the basics, but that is not Bruno’s style. He experimented instead. He sanded the surfaces, shellacked or painted them with a polyurethane water-based clear gloss. Nothing worked until he stumbled on a solution rather serendipitously. During the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympic Games, there were many cultural events and demonstrations throughout the city.
Bruno came across an old Native gentleman sitting on a stool in the corner of a room chiselling a piece of soapstone. There was nobody around, there were no spectators, but the old gentleman did not care. He was probably glad. Bruno quietly watched the master at work for quite a while until he dared approach him. “I like what you are doing, the design, the idea, and the workmanship,” he said. “But how do you finish it at the end?” “With Trewax Paste Wax and polish,” he said.
“T r e w a x Paste Wax what?”
“You know, the floor polish. You heat your finished work in a kitchen oven and apply the Trewax Paste Wax. It will soak into the stone, and when it cools off you buff it.” How devilishly simple, Bruno thought. You never know what you can learn from a person sitting on a stool in the corner of a room unless you ask!
