In this one-on-one interview, Master Stone Carver Harold Vogel discusses the past, present and future of the profession

Born in Detroit, MI, Harold Vogel first learned the craft of stone carving in Germany, where his family returned during the Great Depression. Raised in the Bavarian town of Ansbach, Vogel’s interest in carving was fueled by his grandfather, a restoration sculptor, who taught him how to use a hammer and chisel.

In 1945, he began a stone carving apprenticeship in Nuremberg, and after receiving his master craftsman certificate, he came back to the U.S. and volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army.

Ultimately, Vogel settled in Washington, DC and studied at the Corcoran School of Art (now The Corcoran College of Art + Design) and George Washington University. Vogel’s more prominent projects include work for the National Cathedral, the U.S. Capitol, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove and the CIA Memorial Wall.

Vogel has served as a mentor to several carvers. Among them, stone carver Tim Johnston from the Carving and Restoration Team of Manassas, VA, still adds stars to the CIA Memorial Wall using the methods taught to him by Vogel during the 1970s.

When did you first develop an interest in stone carving? How did you Learn the craft, and how did it evolve over the years?

Vogel: My grandfather was the one who got me involved. He had difficulty explaining things, but he could show me, and he said, “Do it the way I just did it.” This was the way I got started at age five or six. Once when my grandfather was guilding a bust, and we were called to lunch. I wasn’t hungry, but he went, and I finished it for him while he was at lunch. Needless to say, I screwed it up royally. So when he came back, he turned white and he was really mad. When he calmed down, I told him that I just wanted to do something for him. Then he showed me how it is done.

I was maybe 6 or 7 years old, and I was already guilding. Needless to say, I got an early start at it. About a year or so later, somebody came looking for a guilder, and my grandfather was busy. They needed it right away, so my grandfather had me do it.

Then at 14 or 15, I started my apprenticeship with a sculptor in Nuremberg, Germany, who was a stone and a wood carver. A war is never anything to be happy about, but for me, [World War II] turned into a benefit Because there was so much destroyed. Nuremberg had been 80% destroyed at the time, and the city decided to rebuild it the way it had been before the war. I learned many techniques in stone carving that no one had been teaching anymore, because they hadn’t been needed at the time.

When I went to art school, there were guys who were four or five years older than me, and I showed them casting and other things that I felt people should have learned by then.

Then when I came to the U.S., I was very fortunate because I had learned not only how to make it in carving, but specifically in stone. Who knew how to set a flying buttress at the time? When I worked on the Washington Cathedral, I was the youngster there who knew it all. There was some older masons there who wanted to try setting a flying buttress, but they didn’t know it. They thought they could figure it out. When you start a flying buttress, it either goes right or it goes wrong from the very start. And if you don’t know how to do it, there is a 90 percent chance you will screw it up.

While they were working on it, I sneaked up on the scaffold, and I saw it wasn’t going right, and I said, “You’ll never end up in the Right place.” Needless to say, they didn’t, and they had to start over. Then they tried it again, and the same thing happened.

The chief engineer there finally asked me to start the next flying buttress. I looked at the drawings, and there were a few things I didn’t know, so I went home and I had a big drawing table in my studio. And by 9 or 10 p.m., I had it down pat.

I told the carpenter to lower the framing. We had a good crew, and I had a good relationship with the guys. I told them the sequence I wanted, and we got going. We got started about 9 o’clock in the morning. The other guys had taken two days to get their failed attempt up, but by about 3 p. m., we were finished. We had 40 people standing on the scaffolding watching me, and when we put the last piece in there, it fit like a glove. So basically I established my reputation there.

How would you go about training a young sculptor today?

Vogel: I think it is a very physical training. I have a small library on stone here, but most of the things in those books are only part of the knowledge. You cannot use it unless you have the basics. You can read it and You understand what the text says, but you don’t understand what it means unless you have the basic physical knowledge.

I think the stone business is like a family. People that are in the stone business feel kindred to other people in the stone business. If you have a family, and you are the patriarch, you show everyone how it is done. And the more you are able to convey to your family, the better it is for your own future and your family’s future.

What have been some of your preferred stone materials — ones that you felt particularly lent themselves to stone carving?

Vogel: I think I was hooked pretty early. For me, stone carving is carving. Period. When I restored the Senate Chamber in the Capitol in Washington, DC, I had to replicate the dais. I hadn’t carved wood in awhile, but I still knew how to do it, of Course. I was doing quite a bit of woodcarving for them — a new frame for the Declaration of Independence — and I got that job. And the reason for that was because Washington had no real woodcarvers, and I was readily available.

In carving, you have a nondescript piece of material, and you form something with that piece. So in the end, it doesn’t matter if it is granite or mahogany or something else.

So you’ve never looked at a piece of stone, and said, “This is the one I was looking for!”

Vogel: Something like that happened once. I was doing the [Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove], and I was invited down to the Johnson Ranch in Texas to talk about it. Nobody knew me except the person who recommended me. We talked about it, and the landscape architect said, “This ranch would be a good place to find a Boulder.” We walked across the ranch and looked at some boulders. Lady Bird Johnson could walk a lot faster than me, and we were all searching, but we couldn’t find anything that was right. Everything we found was full of fissures.

When we got back and sat down for afternoon coffee, I explained that I liked the idea of taking a boulder from the ranch, but it couldn’t be one that would fall apart after a few winter frosts. She was turned off because no one ever disagreed with Lady Bird Johnson.

We ended up taking stone from a dimensional cut quarry and turning it into a boulder. It was 41 feet high, and we took it up to Washington. We had to unload it in Alexandria, VA, and truck it to the site at 3 o’clock in the morning because they had to block all of the bridges.

There is a glut of machinery on the market today designed to mimic the production of a stone carver. How would you communicate the need for carving with a “human touch” behind it as opposed to something created by a machine?

Vogel: I never had a problem with that because no machine can design. It needs someone behind a machine to create the design. There are some great architects out there, and the ones that were the best of them were the ones who realized that they didn’t know it all when it comes to design.

I was in Italy one time, and I saw a machine designed to copy sculpture. I looked at it, and I could understand exactly how it worked. If you do a building, and you have To do a Corinthian capital, you could use a machine to do something like that, and it might make sense. It is an accepted design, but the machine still doesn’t design anything; it only copies it.

Where do you see the craft of stone carving in the next five years?

Vogel: When I came close to retirement 20 years ago, I thought that I should really do something for the trade and start a stone carving school. We started up a class, and we had one or two months to Advertise it, and we had 20 students. There are plenty of people who would like to learn it. Plenty won’t make it, but that’s alright.

When I was in Charleston, SC, I went to a stone carving college [the American College of Building Arts], and we looked the whole place over. They are teaching about all areas of carving, and they have the whole town behind them. So there is a future there.

Harold Vogel currently resides in Front Royal, VA, and he can be reached at HCVOG@aol.com. For more information on the American College of Building Arts in Charleston, visit www.buildingartscollege.us