ARTS FOR AMATEURS : Stressed-Out Rock Carvers Take Their Crack at Finding the Sculpture Inside the Stone

Terry O’Connell earns her living crunching numbers and mulling figures, frequently working long hours--sometimes even all night--under intense deadline pressure as a financial analyst for Atlantic Richfield Corp.

But on Monday nights, O’Connell steps off the fast track, having emphatically told her boss she is not available to work, no matter how pressing the project.

That’s the night O’Connell puts on old clothes, picks up a mallet and chisel and starts chinking away at a big slab of stone, vanquishing workday stress in the process.

O’Connell is one of about two dozen students enrolled in sculptor Stanley J. Mock’s beginning stone-carving class offered by the Community Service program at Santa Monica College.

“It’s very cathartic after sitting at the computer all day to come and bang on something for three hours,” said O’Connell, 29, of Santa Monica. She added that she has no idea what she is going to make with her 100-pound slab of white alabaster, but that she enjoys the class immensely.

More accustomed to cerebral pursuits than art, O’Connell said she took the sculpture class thinking “it would be interesting . . . the ultimate challenge.”

Richard Kolenda, a chef in the executive dining room at a downtown skyscraper, took the course in quest of a little permanency. Kolenda is experienced in sculpture--in the softer mediums of ice and chocolate--and strives daily to prepare artistically presented cuisine.

But his work always melts or is eaten.

“With this, I still have something left to show for it,” said Kolenda, 41, of Santa Monica, who works in the executive cafeteria at Pacific Enterprises in the First Interstate World Center downtown.

On one recent night, a large Santa Monica College classroom was filled with the pleasant tap-tap-tapping of 18 student sculptors using little mallets on large chunks of alabaster.

Rock flew through the air, and powdery debris littered every conceivable surface of the room, including the tables, the floor, the students and the chocolate cookie that instructor Mock was nibbling.

Unperturbed, Mock drifted around the room offering pointers and inspiration to the students, many of whom have no art experience.

“Something’s got to go. That’s the nature of stone carving,” Mock tells his classes, only half-joking. “The sculpture is in here somewhere, and you can’t see it yet. It’s inside the rock, and your job is to find it. And it’s always further down than you think it is.”

The flat sides of the rock are boring, Mock tells the students. Rounding them captures the eye and brings the sculpture to life.

Joyce Smith, a 38-year-old paralegal for a Westside poverty-law firm, whose delicate crystal earrings contrasted with her workman’s goggles, was intently chipping the corners away from a large alabaster slab.

“I’ve been carving on it for a couple of weeks now, waiting for the stone to talk to me, and here it is. It’s a lady. She has a kind of look like the Madonna,” Smith said, visualizing the features she hopes to carve into the rock.

“I think she’s going to be really beautiful, maybe not in the anatomically perfect sense, but at least she’s going to have alabaster skin,” Smith quipped.

Smith, who has no previous art experience except for a class in making stained-glass windows, described the technique that student sculptors learn.

“You have this rock that looks like any rock at the side of the road, and then you just hammer away at it with a chisel until you’ve gone over the entire surface, and by the time you’ve done it you kind of have a feel for the rock. You know its assets, its liabilities, its cracks,” Smith said.

“You have to be very patient,” said her classmate, Marilyn Valle Sage, 41, an accounting technician at Santa Monica College, who was working nearby on a 50-pound slab of gold-colored alabaster, which she hopes to sculpt into the gracefully rounded shape of an open seedpod.

“I’ve been working on this for three weeks,” Sage said. “A lot of it has to do with just relaxing and knowing that it’s going to take a while.”

Students are given a basic set of tools, including chisels, mallets and files. A pointed chisel is used for carving the rock, and a saw-toothed chisel for shaving it, said Mock, a graduate of UC Santa Barbara and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He has taught sculpture at UCLA and the University of Kentucky and his work has been displayed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other places.

The students start with large slabs of alabaster mined by hand in odd shapes from California’s Anza-Borrego Desert or quarried in neat blocks in Utah or Colorado.

Mock tells students to go over the entire surface of the rock first with the mallet and chisel, leaving “a confusing surface of channels on the stone’s surface.” Once the general shape of the desired sculpture is formed, students take flat chisels “and knock off the top of those little valleys.”

At some point, Mock tells the class, the rock will cease to be just a rock and become a sculpture.

The next step is to file the rock smooth, using a series of coarse files. Other oddly shaped, sharp instruments are used to refine the form of the sculpture. Then the stone is smoothed with finer files. Finally, the student goes over his finished work with six increasingly finer grades of sandpaper, ending with one that is “so fine, it doesn’t even seem like sandpaper,” Mock said.

“At that point, there will be no discernible scratches whatsoever on the stone,” Mock said. The student then oils and waxes his finished sculpture to a silky smooth sheen.

The various alabasters were black, pink, sienna, gray and green. Some students make simple abstract shapes. Others make complex representational shapes: figures, heads, torsos or forms found in nature, Mock said.

“I really encourage people to make what they want to make,” he added.

Mock said he encourages beginning students to make a maquette, or clay model, the same shape as their rock to help acquaint them with the three-dimensionality of their rock and get ideas.

The maquette falls by the wayside as the forms start taking shape in the stone, Mock said.

Mock said he must encourage new students to chisel away more of the rock. Understandably, they are reluctant to do so, because once chiseled away, “nothing can go back on.”

Two-thirds of the two dozen students in the current class are taking the course for the first time. The others have taken the course more than once, Mock said. Kolenda, for instance, who was working on the most convoluted and polished piece in the room--a large, undulating series of abstract female nudes--said he has been taking the class about five times a year for nearly three years.

Kolenda said he looks forward to the class all week.

“People read about the course in the brochure and say, ‘Oh, that looks like fun,’ ” Mock said. “I can get out once a week. Doctors, lawyers, all sorts of people. They all work all day and then come here and do something for themselves.

“It’s financially extraordinarily reasonable therapy. You just start working on the rock and lose the bad day at work, the stress from the job. The phone doesn’t ring here. You come in, and you pick up the hammer and the chisel and leave all the stress in the parking lot,” Mock said.

Anyone can do it, he added. “All you need are Monday nights off and a sense of adventure.”

Introduction to Stone-Carving is offered on a recurring basis by Santa Monica College, 1900 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. The 16-week course costs $100, and students should expect to pay an additional $40 to $50 for their stone and carving tools. For more information, call (213) 452-9214.