Interview with Jerry Williams, Owner and Principal Barre Sculpture Studios

Published April 28, 2015, The Barre Reader

When did you found Barre Sculpture Studios?

1986

How has the shop changed since then?

Quite dramatically, in fact. We’ve gone from a monument carving shop to a full service sculptural studio. The work I do here including public works, and privately commissioned work. We still do a custom monument business but they are definitely one of a kind pieces.

How did you first get involved with sculpture?

I first got involved with sculpture in high school, and became interested again when I moved to Vermont. Someone showed me soapstone as a carving material, because it was mined in Vermont, and it was really nice carving material. I wanted to take it further and somebody told me about Barre, so I stumbled into (Frank) Gaylord’s studio one day and it just felt like it was home. I was going to Johnson state to pursue a BFA, but ended up getting hired by Gaylord, and doing what I was going to school for. Gaylord asked me, “what do you need school for if you’re already doing it?”.

In what ways is your shop similar to Frank’s?

Frank always pursued the art of sculpture. He was a member of the National Sculpture Society, so he wasn’t a monument shop per se, he was a sculptor that did monuments, and that’s kind of the model I chose to follow. Sculpture first, and then whatever pays the bills. Being in a granite town, monuments are a good bet to make a living.

What have taken away from working with granite?

You have to make decisions and follow through. Whereas in a lot of things like clay or drawing it’s more fluid, it can start one way and end up somewhere else. Granite is not like that, you have to be able to make a decision, and your decision has to be correct or else you are going to have three times as much work to correct it. You have to be committed to a result, and see it through. It’s more than a mental commitment, it’s physical too. You have to be tenacious to get anything done. Sometimes a job can take a year, and you have to see it all the way through. You can’t walk away.

That being said, granite is really too hard to go into your later ages. It’s really young man’s game. I learned how small the market is for granite sculpture is. Hardly anyone is doing it. The Italians like marble, people who do bronze don’t carve stone, so you are really in a narrow niche and that works to your advantage because people don’t have that many places to go.

What are you working on currently?

Bronze. I’m currently working on a 7ft statue of Alexander Hamilton for bronze, and a small two thirds life sized figure for a private client. Every job has it’s own unique challenges, no two jobs are the same. They are different scale, different subject matter, different material, so the challenge is always finding solutions to get the job done. Trying new mediums is a challenge.

What inspires you about the work you do?

At this point I am more interested in the design of something, and I’d like to communicate a good sense of design in my work. I like figurative work, but I’m really starting to become more interested in abstraction. I enjoy working with material that has a sense of permanence, and that it links me up with a lineage of stone workers that goes back to prehistoric times. It’s archetypal. There must be some link to history, and to human nature. You wonder what made a guy pick up a rock thousands of years ago and start to chip away at it, and leave artifacts that we are still finding today.

How do you feel you have contributed to the craft of stone carving?

By bringing people into it and introducing them to stone work, or helping them see through a project, and share with them that excitement of completing a project. Then I get to follow them in what they are doing. People are coming from all different walks of life, and you learn from them what they bring to the table as well.

What do you see in the future of stone carving?

I think technology is going to limit what people can do with stone, because when you have a choice to do something mechanically, you do it. So you stop doing the self-knowledge explorations where you are learning every little bit of how to do something with stone. People start losing that after a while. People have asked me when I am doing a stone project, “so do you use lasers?” and they automatically think that some computer is going to scan this model and I am just plugging it in to a mechanical process. Technology is a way to work around something, but stone carving is an ancient art so why not learn it from the bottom up? If I didn’t have the tools I have now, I could still do something with primitive tools – anything that’s pointed. You could evolve as a stone carver slowly, or job it out to a machine. I think everyone now wants to be an art director and say, “I’m the idea guy” and give the idea to somebody else so they can move on, but with stone, there are no shortcuts.