Las Vegas Weekly

Romancing the stone

Local artist teaches stone carving at Downtown art studio

“Higher Love” by Sharon Gainsburg

Photo: April Corbin

Sharon Gainsburg delicately runs her hand along the curves of the stone, her fingers and mind evaluating it in ways the others in the room cannot yet understand. The local artist begins to write faint Fs on different areas of the white stone with a colored pencil. “Everywhere I put an F, I mean file,” she says, before jokingly adding, “It doesn’t mean fail.” The student laughs and picks up a chisel. Gainsburg is at her studio – Gainsburg Studio – located in the Downtown Arts District, and she is teaching the art of stone carving.

The method she teaches, direct carving, involves working with the natural shapes in the stone. According to Gainsburg, it takes away the anxiety that newcomers to the craft have. Gainsburg’s class, a 12-week course offered for $420 (plus the price of the stone, sold at $2 per pound), caters to stone carving rookies. The local artist estimates that 75 percent of her students have no prior experience with three-dimensional art.

While Gainsburg has been an artist for nearly 30 years, she still remembers the hesitations she had before her first foray into stone carving. She’d been sculpting with clay for more than 10 years before someone pushed her into the art form that’s now her main source of income. “I resisted,” she recalls. “Stone is a taking-away method, and it frightened me after working with clay, where you could just add on.”

Her studio, the class and an adjoined gallery filled with for-sale sculptures prove that Gainsburg’s switch was the right decision. “When I finally picked up the hammer and chisel, I felt like I had arrived.”

Explaining the allure of her preferred form of art in words proves a bit more difficult, however. “You’re working with a material millions of years old,” she says. “There’s a connection, whether you can verbalize it or not. It’s almost like a universal consciousness.”

Gainsburg believes stone carving is also symbolic of life itself. “Sometimes the stone doesn’t do what you want it to do, and you have to change your idea.”

Just like life.

One of Gainsburg’s students, Kathy Becker, had no idea what her third stone piece would look like. “It just kept evolving,” she says. A year after first picking out the stone, her piece of Nevada alabaster has become a dragonfly and leaves set on a white, textured base. She’s close to completion, hoping to have the stone ready before Gainsburg Studio’s student showcase, October 17 and 18.

After the exhibition, Becker plans to take her stone carving home and put it on display. “I’m keeping this,” she exclaims, jokingly wrapping her arms around her statue. “I’m not giving it to anyone.”

The sense of accomplishment from chiseling and filing something out of raw material from the earth is a big draw for the students at Gainsburg Studio. Becker admits that when she walks by the two carvings she previously did in the class, which are set up in her home, she is sometimes taken back. Becker adds, “I can’t believe I did that.”