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What We're Here For:

Wiki Stone Carver started out as a how-to page about the mechanics, but it quickly became evident that chipping away the stone isn't the hardest part. During the Modernist revolutions of the 20th Century, old fashioned carving lost its seat at the table for a while, and a lot of things that working artists once knew aren't so commonplace anymore.

Painters look back a generation, but sculpture has traditionally looked back millenia. Roman sculptors in the time of Julius Caesar, working in a living tradition that was already five hundred years old, were as aware of Phydias and Praxiteles as Michelangelo would be in the Sixteenth Century, or as Rodin, working within the memory of people still living, would be two thousand years later. Perhaps sculpture takes such a long view because, like architecture, it is a part of our shared daily life, and not the esoteric concern of an isolated elite. We go museums and galleries to see paintings, but sculpture is part of the living world, in parks, decorating fountains and train stations, on grave stones and in churches.
 
Orthodoxies come and go, but mercifully, in the last few years, they have mostly been going. Modernism was no longer new back in Grandma and Grandpa's day, and this year's art school graduates had not even born the last time Post-Modernism sounded like a fresh idea. The art world of today is a house with many rooms.

This project is for anyone interested in carving: artists, craftspeople, museum goers, academics, students, the idly curious. There are references and notes for those who want to go farther. Many of these are not in print, and some are not easily found in the public library, but through the miracle of Alibris and Amazon, you should be able to find any of the books mentioned easily. A few are available for free in electronic form, as are some of the articles.

Status:
This is a work in progress. Whole sections ae only indicated by a heading, and a host of tasks need work.  Editing, Web-design and implementation, photography, content, art, blogging, historical research and fact-checking help are all welcome.

Technology:
Petty much everything having to do with this site, except the actual Web hosting, is courtesy of the amazing opensource community. Any inadequacies in the site framework are the fault of the authors, not of the excellent Kompozer Web development tool, which was used to create the framework pages on aMac. The main text was written in the LaTeX typesetting markup language, which is widely used for high-quality mathematics, engineering, and computer science publications, but is still catching on elsewhere. LaTeX was created by Leslie Lamport to make the TeX typesetting language, by Donald Knuth usable by mere mortals. The Hyperlatex package, by Otfried Cheong was also used. Hyperlatex allows the input to be seamlessly generated in both document form and as HTML pages from the same source documents. The Git source--code control system is used to manage changes to the text and source. Blogging is courtesy of WordPress.

Getting In Touch:
Doubtless there are errors, missing topics, and this being art, one-sided presentations of inflammatory topics. Please feel free to send corrections, complaints, suggestions, etc., to peterc@sculpturewiki.com. And don't be mean... I'm very sensitive.