The Art of the Shape
“I recently had a meeting with a group talking about a 15’ sculpture for in front of their church, and that’s definitely a new challenge,” Galloway says. “I have no idea what I’m going to see and what my clients’ vision might be. These people weren’t very clear about their vision, so it’s a brand new game every time we start.”
A Technician
Particularly in the past, Galloway has often been constrained by what the client visualizes.
“Mostly I’ve worked to other people’s specifications,” he says. “Depending on how sophisticated and generous they are, they let me participate in the choice. It depends on how controlling they are in their architectural vision and the whole scheme of the building.”
“The most exciting thing is if you’re working on a face or a figure and you see it each day. If you’re careful, the face will start to become almost alive.”
William Galloway
Galloway Stone Carving
In those cases, Galloway describes himself as little more than a technician, similar to someone who’s asked to cast copies of a bronze piece created by someone else. A good case in point – although he says he loved the job – was the renovation of the former New York Times Building on Times Square in New York.
Galloway was called upon to recreate decorative stone elements of the building – four griffin panels and a pilaster capital decorated with acanthus leaves to go over a doorway in the building. Now known as the Times Square Building, it was originally constructed between 1912 and 1937.
“Most of my architectural work is referred from the limestone companies,” he explains. “The contract goes to a major limestone company and then they contact me because they don’t have full-time carvers. We then negotiate and work something out, or they try to find somebody cheaper.”
For this particular job, Galloway says he received a cast of the best of the existing griffins on the building, and was then expected to do some to match the mold as presented, and others in reverse. The duplications had to be to within 1/8” of the original mold.
The acanthus leaves proved to be their own challenge.
“All of the leaves were different, even though it achieved a pattern,” he says. “Each leaf had a different shape to it, and I had to count the little fronds because this had to be duplicated exactly.”
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Often, time can be of the essence with these projects.
“It depends on the scope of the project, but the timeframe is supposed to match the shipment of the stone from the mills,” Galloway says. “The mill may be doing a lot of different things – flat jobs that can measure thousands of cubic feet – but they want my stone to match a particular shipment. It might be four weeks down the road or it might be 12 weeks down the road.”
For big jobs, Galloway will contract with other carvers to keep the work on schedule and ship when needed. The challenge, he says, is figuring out what each person can do and what they can’t. He’ll then train them in a certain aspect of a job and turn them loose.
“One might be good at flowers or leaves or lettering,” Galloway explains. “If you coordinate this with a little bit of management. you can put out a lot of stone quickly.”
He compares it to playing a really rough sport as a team, and certainly the physical side of the job requires a fair amount of physicality.
“You have to be in shape, but you also have to take risks and not lose on those risks,” he says.
However, he says the mental side of the work can be at least as tough.
“There’s a lot of technical cutting, which can be tough, but the carving is another game that has its own disciplines,” Galloway says. “If you have to do one leaf 100 times with no variation, the mental discipline is as important as the physical discipline.”
