ARTISTS / SCULPTURE : Her Own Stone : * After Career as ‘Enlarger’ of Other Sculptors’ Works, JoAnne Duby Readies One-Woman Show

At 2 p.m. the sun is high over Art City. JoAnne Duby, one of the sculptors who inhabits this odd little amusement park for artists on Ventura’s west side, is finishing a piece of black marble with an electric grinder.

It’s a hot afternoon, but Duby is wearing a blue hat, safety goggles, an aspirator, heavy pants, a heavy white shirt and a green apron. No gloves. The black marble looks like a giant black tooth.

“It is a tooth,” said Duby, taking off her mask and goggles. “I made it for my dentist. We’re trading.”

The giant tooth only looks like a tooth on top. But its curved root brings it away from realism and into the realm of art.

JoAnne Duby is carving stones again.

Tossing aside a career that gave her an international reputation as an “enlarger” of other sculptors’ works, Duby is busy preparing a one-woman show of her own that will open in July at the Ventura County National Bank in Oxnard.

From now on, any art she works on will have to be her own.

Duby, 39, was a ceramist until she was 26. Then one day she carved a bird out of stone. And that was it--the beginning of a love affair with stone. She found it “enormously pleasurable and totally exhausting,” and moved to Santa Barbara to become an assistant to Donald Davis, a sculptor famous for his work in Italian marble.

A few years later she moved to Grass Valley with sculptor Todd Andrews and helped start TASCO--Todd Andrews Sculpting Co., the West Coast’s only enlargement studio.

As an enlarger, her job was to transform small models into monumental sculptures. She got very good at it.

Working with Andrews, she enlarged sculptor Malcolm Alexander’s 18-inch model of a pioneer family into an 18-foot monument for the city of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Pretty soon foundries were calling Duby from all over the country. She no longer had time for her own work.

She spent a decade working in every sculpting medium, and in every style. But eventually she got tired of someone else getting all the glory while she did all the work.

So one day she got in a car and drove to Ventura. And that was it. She stayed, hooked up with Art City and began carving stones again.

“It was the best idea I ever had,” she said.

One of the first things she did was buy new tools.

“The boys laughed at me,” she said, “but I spent $4,000 on the best tools I could find.”

Piled in her locker are Skillsaws, pneumatic hammers, die grinders, diamond cutting blades, drill bits, chisels and hammers, three of them, the biggest weighing 2 1/2 pounds. She likes the one-pound hammer best.

“I can swing it all day,” she said. “And if I miss with it, it’s not half the pain.

“And I do miss.”

The Art City Supply Co. sells large stones: marble, anhydrite, alabaster and travertine, ranging in size from pieces you can hold in your hand to an eight-ton block of gold-veined marble.

Duby pointed out three pieces she’s picked out. They’re alabaster. She intends to carve them in time for her show and she’s been looking at them, poring over them, dreaming about them, living with them, trying to imagine what’s inside.

“If someone asks me how long a piece took, I never can say,” she said. “I’m working on several at once, all in different stages. I’ve already started on these.”

She walked over to one of the stones and ran her hand down the rough surface. Her finger stopped and tapped a flaw.

“Here’s the problem,” she said, tapping a crack. “We’ll take this whole area out. And what are you left with? In my brain I have a clear image of what’s left, and what has to be done.”

She pointed out another big stone, in a part of Art City where all the stones are for sale. This one’s black Virginia soapstone, and, although she’s had offers, she won’t sell it to anyone. She wants it for herself.

“It has fine lines already,” she said, running her hand over its rough edges, and you wonder what she sees.

“I’ve always been a purist when it comes to rock. I like simple lines. I’m always looking for that one beautiful line that holds everything.”

Her recent small works, on display in the Art City gallery, attest to this. They’re delicate, lyrical.

And colorful.

“I love color,” Duby said. “You get painterly when you work with alabaster. This stone makes me hungry for peaches.”

These are Duby’s “bread and butter pieces,” which will be sent out to galleries in Nevada City, Ojai and Los Angeles. They will support her while she moves on to her next challenge, which she sums up as “harder and larger,” meaning harder rock in bigger pieces.

“Harder rock is more permanent, and more of a challenge,” she said. “They’re harder to move. But bigger stones have more integrity. They’re not filled with problems.”

Duby is interested in becoming more “playful” with her work. She’s also interested in combining metal and stone, and her big black tooth will give her the perfect excuse to do so. It will be capped in bronze and polished to a golden luster.

It’s clear that Duby has love of stone. It’s perhaps what makes her, in the eyes of her peers, a “sculptor’s sculptor.”

“She knows a tremendous amount about carving stone,” said Chris Blackwell, one of the sculptors at Art City.

“I came here with nothing but a file and a rock, and stayed on as JoAnne’s apprentice,” Michele Chapin said. “She’s an excellent teacher, a hell of a technician. She has a lot of patience. And a ton of experience.”

“Paintings don’t last,” Duby said. “They’re gone in 2,000 years. But with a piece of stone, you’re working on something that’s already millions of years old.”

She paused for a second, then added, “We are the recorders of our own history. When they dig up our artifacts in 10,000 years, I wonder what they will think of us.”