How a Michael Tine sculpture is made
A Michael Tine sculpture is carved by hand, in stone, without a finished plan. He works mostly in marble, also limestone, alabaster, travertine, and soapstone, with hammer and chisel, and lets the figure come up out of the block as he removes material. The slowness is the method, not a constraint on it.
What follows is the sequence a piece goes through. It is the same craft whether the work is personal or commissioned; the difference is only how the design is arrived at.
Choosing the stone
A piece begins with a specific block, not a generic material. The stone is chosen for size and for what is inside it, because a hidden crack or void can decide what the block can become or end a piece outright. He has long sourced stone through Art City Studios in Ventura, and marble of the kind that first brought him there.
He prefers to work large. In a big block a broken corner is recoverable, with plenty of material still to go after; in a small one, the same flaw can take the whole piece. Scale is partly an insurance policy and partly just how he likes to work.
The design, or the deliberate lack of one
For personal work there is, by intention, almost no design phase. He does not execute a finished drawing. He starts close to a blank slate and lets the image emerge from the stone as he carves, so the deciding happens in the material rather than before it.
A commission is different and he is clear-eyed about that. There the design is conventional and collaborative: the idea, scale, and direction are agreed with the client and approved before serious stone is removed, because in carving there is no putting material back. After approval, the hand process is the same as any other piece.
Roughing out
The early stage is subtractive and physical: hammer and chisel, removing waste stone to find the large masses of the form. This is the heaviest labor in the piece and the stage where the scale of a block earns its keep.
Refining the form
As the masses resolve, the tools get finer and the decisions get smaller and more consequential. This is where the figure actually arrives, and where the absence of a fixed plan shows: the form is found by working, looking, and working again, not by transferring a drawing onto stone.
He is candid that not everything is invention. He looks hard at draftsmen he admires and borrows from them, dryly admitting he has “stolen some of their work when I thought I could get away with it.” The borrowing happens here, in the reading of the form, not in copying an object.
Finishing
Finishing decides how the stone meets light: surface worked from rougher to smoother, with the degree of polish chosen for the piece rather than applied by default. Detail work at this stage is entirely by hand. He has described the fine ornamental passages on more elaborate pieces as handwork, every leaf and edge cut individually rather than mechanically reproduced.
Installing
The last stage is physical again: a finished stone is heavy and has to be based, moved, and set without damage. For a near-life-size figure earlier in his career he left certain sections thicker than the final design until after transport, then finished them on site, precisely so nothing snapped in transit. Installation is part of the making, not an afterthought.
Why it takes as long as it takes
The time is not waste to be optimized away. The carving is where the thinking happens, and at eighty-two he framed the labor itself as something he wants to keep doing as long as his body allows: he likes using his muscles and intends to keep working that way. A Michael Tine piece is slow because the method is slow on purpose.