Business, blogs and stone sculpture

I was flattered, albeit slightly confused, yesterday to receive a call from the Better Business Bureau. Apparently someone had made an inquiry as to my business’s credibility and they were following up for that person. This website was originally begun as a front for freelance design I intended to do, but never really got around to other than three or four random projects. In fact, I was surprised when I caught the blogging fever. My first idea for The Aesthetic Elevator was to be no more than a portfolio with some contact information. I do maintain a page whereby people visiting the website can contact me for freelance design work, but I don’t push it and, in truth, am much more interested in pursuing my tactile art than doing any more graphic design at this point in my life.

Although the money is good in freelance design, and sometimes that’s hard to pass up.

A while back I found LeAnne Martin’s blog titled Christians in the Arts. I followed it for a short time without being interested in much of the content — her interviews weren’t usually with visual artists — but for some reason I re-added it to my list of blogs a few months ago. I’m glad I did; a number of her recent posts have been with tactile artists.

The most recent entry is part I of a conversation with Stephanie Tumney. Tumney is a gifted stone sculptor. I don’t find many people working in stone (or other traditional sculptural media such a bronze, for that matter), so I was intrigued. Her website is a bit scant in the gallery department, containing images of only five works, but these works are quite nice.

I like the scale and style of the abstraction she’s using with the figure. It’s reminiscent of Leonard Dufresne’s characters, which I’m quite fond of. They almost seem more human to my eye despite being slightly out of proportion. The exaggerations somehow increase a viewer’s affection towards the people being portrayed in the stone and pigment and, if you’ll allow me to extrapolate even more, give us hopeful perception of humanity.

It’s a thrill to come across artists of faith like Tumney, whose works will endure aesthetically and physically.