Ladies and gentlemen, I present the 90s.
If movies like The Karate Kid launched a martial arts fad in the 80s, then movies like The Mighty Ducks did the same for hockey in the 90s. That may not mean much to folks from hockey country, but in middle-of-nowhere, Ohio, a bunch of kids suddenly deciding they loved hockey was a big deal.
There was one part of that movie that always stuck with me. Emilio Estevez (son of Martin Sheen, brother of Charlie Sheen, and the only one to actually keep his birth name) was obsessed with missing a goal in the championship hockey game as a kid. He never got over it. If he’d have aimed a quarter inch to the left, they’d have won.
Can your life really be turned upside down by such a small mistake?
It turns out there’s a whole class of folks who live and die by mistakes of a quarter inch or smaller: stone sculptors.
The Most Difficult Art Form
Stone sculpting is painfully unforgiving–one stray cut and you mar a delicate feature. Though sculptors certainly have their tricks, it is very difficult to erase or replace a mistake, particularly if you hold to making a statue out of one solid piece of stone. It also requires absolutely incredible skill. You have to both chisel large amounts of stone away in a rough manner (without removing too much) and do the most unbelievable detail work you can imagine.
Any element of the statue that is out of proportion will be immediately obvious. If you carve a perfect human specimen, but one foot is too small, everyone will know it. You need a vast knowledge of your subject too. If depicting a human, you need to understand the human body intimately: how the flesh sits on muscle and bone, and how the whole thing moves and changes in different postures.
Here’s one of the greatest marvels of stone sculpture…
Meet Michelangelo’s Pieta.
He completed this incredible statue at the ripe young age of twenty-four. It depicts Mary holding Jesus after he was taken down from the cross. Michelangelo did not take the easy route for any aspect of this sculpture.
First, he never carved stone from a model. While many other artists would build a small clay version of the finished statue before taking chisel to stone, Michelangelo preferred to do the sculpting equivalent of “shoot first and ask questions later.” He sometimes claimed that all he had to do was carve away all the stone that didn’t belong to the final image. This meant he had to do the big, bold cuts into the stone purely using his imagination instead of a model. He made it seem easy.
An absolutely stunning amount of detail in the fabric
But he didn’t choose an easy design. Mary wasn’t wearing a simple robe, but a huge, voluminous one with fold upon fold upon fold. He placed the body of Jesus in a prominent position that forced him to carve every detail of muscle and bone under his skin from his legs, to his stomach, chest, and arms. He could have draped the Christ figure in a funeral covering to avoid this, but instead he increased the challenge.
How’d he make stone look like skin, veins, muscles, and bone?
Finally, Michelangelo insisted on working from one solid piece of marble. That meant no mistakes from start to finish. Carving from a single stone isn’t an uncommon choice for sculptors at the top of their game, but it requires a lot of extra thought to work. When multiple stones are used, it can be a lot easier to distribute the weight of the heavy stone evenly. The artist can even experiment with different configurations. With a single stone source, the artist has to be sure the weight is ideally distributed or the whole thing can crack or tip over.
How do you even chisel an intricately-folded robe like this?
For Pieta, this meant Michaelangelo had to balance Mary’s voluminous robe on her left side with the weight of Christ’s body on her right. If one side was considerably heavier than the other, the statue would probably crack somewhere in the middle. Michelangelo’s solution was basically to carve away the stone in a pyramid or mountain-like shape with Mary’s head at the peak and her robes and the Christ figure spreading out evenly underneath. Of course, you don’t really notice any of that when you look at the statue. You just see the incredible detail and deep human emotion of the scene. All the artistic cleverness is hidden from view.
Michelangelo’s larger than life accomplishments are deceptive
Because he did make mistakes. We just don’t really hear about them. Sculptors have to spend a lot of time doing their craft wrong before they can do it right. And they don’t advertise all the statues and carvings they make that don’t work out. They throw them away.
Business owners don’t have that luxury. A lot of your mistakes are expensive, and starting over costs you a lot more than just the time you wasted on your first attempt. But you too can learn to chisel away a masterpiece. When you do, people tend to forget the failures. Nobody holds the Apple Lisa or NeXT computers against Steve Jobs, because he perfected his craft with the iMac, iPhone, and iPad. Proctor & Gamble have plenty of product ventures that fail, but their superhits are so strong nobody cares.
Are you tired of feeling like you’re making the same mistakes over and over again? Eager to carve your own business masterpiece? Give us a call. We can help.