When a stone processing plant near Vancouver went broke one year, they sold raw stone at very good prices.  My sculptor friend Georg Schmerholz and I each bought several pieces of this beautiful red-purple ‘mahogany granite’ from South Dakota.  He got these two pieces because he saw them first (actually one piece broken in two).  He mounted them on a vertical pin, spaced to accentuate the mouth, then gave the whole thing to me when he moved to California and didn’t want to move them.

With no carving at all, the gap between the segments already suggested a mouth.  Minimal carving of the face accentuated that suggestion.

Photos by Lee Gass and Pete Calverley.