Devin Devine stone mason and artist
devin@devineescapes.com
People ask me do I work with a plan, or just make it all up as I go?
Usually I have an idea, for any artistic patio or dry stone sculpture I’m about to build. Often the idea involves many facets and a couple experiments, and thus I make many preliminary drawings. As I work I come up with solutions as I go, make course corrections, add a new little touch here and there. I discover surprises along the way.
Other times I have no real plan, and just jump
I jump off into the abyss with a pile of stones in tow. I figure it out as I go, in alternating states of terror and ecstatic joy–as was the case with both patio spirals I made in 2024, and the serpentine multi yin yang I made in 2023.
For the second flagstone mosaic spiral I came up with a much more satisfying central spiral image, if seen from above–but to be fair, the one on the left looks really cool in person. For both I made it up as I went.
In the case of my recent sculpture, Lithadelic Sphere the 8th I had an idea to create 3 distinct faces. Each one with a main color, an inlay color, and some minor embellishments. This was a bit tricky to achieve: each main color had to look good with its inlay, and each face had to transition well to the faces on each side…plus, this involved horizontal color gradients, rather than vertical color gradients, as I’ve done before. If you follow what I’m saying.
So, this involves a lot of plan
I’m still waiting to get more photos that how all the different faces of this recent sphere sculpture. This photo shows the olive green face with burgundy inlay
On the right here we have the purple face with yellow inlay. On the left is my first Lithadelic Sphere Sculpture, for comparison.
But a lot of discovery and challenge along the way.
Here’s a couple of the drawings I made for the Lithadelic Water Drop, a sculpture I began last October. The shape I ended up going with is more similar to the drawing on the left. Color arrangement is not shown here, and was half decided on site, after acquiring materials.
Thank you
