Peter Coates

An Experiment

I just finished this carved and painted wooden goat head. Despite its conventional appearance, it’s an experimental piece. More on that below. Right now it’s so new it still reeks of lacquer thinner. The piece shows up in an unfinished state in a couple of earlier posts. I’d love to have shown the process end-to-endContinue reading “An Experiment”

A Figure In Stone #2

Making The Clay Miniature As I mentioned in the A Figure In Stone #1 I’m going to start with a 1/2 scale model and enlarge it. Here’s how the small version came to be. Model #1 I don’t usually work with a live model in front of me. A real person might be the inspiration,Continue reading “A Figure In Stone #2”

A Figure In Stone #1

The Kickoff! This is the first in a series of posts about carving a female figure. This is episode #1 of a series on a significant scale project. I’ve been videoing since I started a few weeks ago. There should be a lot of postings and they might or might not have a YouTube (thisContinue reading “A Figure In Stone #1”

Yikes!

I recently discovered a great new way to set the studio on fire. It was a complete surprise. If I ever knew this could happen I’d completely forgotten until it happened to me. I’m paranoid about fire. My former studio was gutted by fire about fifteen years ago. The building that the studio was inContinue reading “Yikes!”

Heavy Weight

This platform is for heavy work. A big block of stone, a 400 pound anvil, or a section of tree trunk. I don’t know how much it would safely hold, but it’s a lot. I would not think twice about setting a half-ton block on it.

Dude, how dumb are you?!

I’m learning so much from making YouTube videos about working in the studio. Minor thing number one is that I had no idea that making videos is hard. Forget making a good one–it took me a month to make one that I wasn’t embarrassed to watch alone in the basement. Minor thing number two wasContinue reading “Dude, how dumb are you?!”

Old-School Materials Science

Classical Greek sculpture arrived abruptly as these things go. In the Fifth Century BCE, naturalistic sculpture suddenly replaced the stylized kouroi that had decorated Greek temples for centuries. The sensibility seems to change overnight. It was the same Greeks and there is no matching discontinuity in architecture, so what happened? A lot of things changedContinue reading “Old-School Materials Science”

A Sculpture Enlarging Machine Part 1

I’ve seen these in photos and old books but I’ve never seen one in the wild so I built one. It was a fun project and there’s some interesting geometry going on if that’s something that interests you.

The Easy Way

We had to move the stones we cut to a new home the next day. They were easy to load because we had a hoist at the starting end but how do you get half-ton blocks of stone off at the other end without breaking the stone, the concrete driveway, or the tail of theContinue reading “The Easy Way”

Splitting Stone

One person working alone can split a stone of almost any size using little more than a drill, some steel wedges and a hammer. Brooklyn is a great place. I met a guy on the street one day and we started talking and somehow it came up that we both carved stone. What are theContinue reading “Splitting Stone”