On a sunny November day, Jesse Salisbury stands in the yard behind his home in the woods of Washington County. Clad in a T-shirt, fleece vest and khaki pants, he stares at a boulder. An 8-foot-high, 19th-century drill is twisting a coring bit the size of a soup can into the mass of black granite streaked with quartz.

A jagged crevasse carved by multiple cuts of the drill bit curves around the boulder. Water runs out of the cut onto a concrete slab, pooling at the base of the rock.

Salisbury is having fun.

Salisbury lives in the house he grew up in off the Joe Leighton Road in Steuben. Boulders and hunks of rock he collected from gravel pits and quarries in Washington and Hancock counties line the edge of the driveway. A 1950s mechanical crane with a 40-foot boom, capable of lifting 20 tons of stone, sits idle, waiting for the 29-year-old sculptor to move a huge rock for one of his artworks.

Some young Maine-born artists opt to make their home in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles or another major art hub. But Salisbury has chosen to live in the landscape that inspires him and deal with the challenge of marketing his work from afar. He lives only a few miles away from where he went to elementary school.

“I’ve never been happier,” he reflected while taking a break in the kitchen. Two finished pieces in black granite, a crouching bobcat and a humanized feline called “Cat woman,” sit on worktables.

Salisbury’s pieces take months to complete and sell for thousands of dollars. He doesn’t have an agent but he has had some success. His work is featured annually at Peter and Jane Weil’s Tunk River Sculpture and Gardens gallery in Steuben. “Articulation,” a curved length of stone cut into pieces and connected by a long core running through the center of each section, and “Pagoda,” a vertical stack of pink granite slabs, stand on the Weils’ lawn.

In addition, Salisbury has shown his work at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and the “Exhibition of Contemporary Art, 2001” at Miyazaki Airport in Japan.

Salisbury tries to avoid doing commissioned pieces.

“I never do the same thing twice,” he explained. “One piece leads to another.”

Dan Farrenkopf co-founded Lunaform, a producer of artful concrete urns and planters in West Sullivan, which has been featured in Gardens Illustrated, Garden Design and numerous other publications. He says Salisbury shows a focus uncommon for such a young artist. He has watched him develop as a sculptor over the past five years.

“What I think is unique about Jesse’s work is the fact his process is somewhat evident in the finished product,” Farrenkopf said. “You may see a drill mark where a split has been made. Then it will blend into the natural weathered skin of the stone, and into an architecturally precise surface.”

Farrenkopf also noted that Salisbury manages to achieve a playful quality in his work.

“They are somewhat autobiographical,” he said.

Since the age of 8 or 9, Salisbury has always wanted to carve stone. In his rambles along the beaches in Steuben, he imagined cutting shapes into the rocks. Sometimes, after classes at the Ella Lewis Elementary School, he would go to the Weils’ Steuben home and carve wood in the second-story workshop of an old barn on the couple’s property.

During his high school years, Salisbury’s father served as a diplomat in Japan. Salisbury moved abroad with his parents and studied traditional Japanese bizen pottery. Later as a student at Colby College in Waterville and in New York, he learned to carve soft stone such as marble and alabaster, which he says are more commonly used in America. Returning again to Japan, he apprenticed himself to Japanese stone sculptors and learned how to work with harder rock such as granite and basalt. The techniques and skills he acquired while studying with sculptors Katsumi Ida and Atsuo Okamoto surpassed those he had learned in America.

“[Japan] is where I really learned how to split,” Salisbury said. “There are tricks to get the stone to do what you want. You always have one shot to get the split right.”

Working outdoors, Salisbury uses a variety of tools to carve the rough form he has in mind, the idea of which he works out ahead in clay or wood models. When cutting rock, he uses hammers and chisels but also employs electric and pneumatic drills to cut around a piece of stone he wants to remove. Sometimes he hammers wedges into the drilled holes to try and pry a piece off. H may also use a power saw with diamond particles embedded in the blade to cut through the rock.

“Carving is a constant process of slowing down,” Salisbury said. “You have to keep slowing down and using less aggressive tools.” The less invasive a tool, the more subtlety he can achieve in his work.

“Now I try to use both [hand and power tools],” he continued. “But I am very careful to not lose that subtlety.”

Winter weather does not deter Salisbury from his work. In cold weather, he dons a snowmobile suit and steel-toe boots and wheels the piece on a worktable out the barn doors of his studio. If his hands get too cold, he moves the stone back in to analyze his progress and plan his next step.

“I can’t work below 20 degrees, but I can work below freezing,” he says.

Salisbury always knew he would return to Steuben. Neither New York nor Japan are known for wide open spaces, and his parents’ 60-acre property affords him plenty of room to work. Also, in the rural setting he can obtain stone for free or next to nothing.

“I don’t know if I got lucky because I picked the medium or if I picked the medium because I was here,” Salisbury said.

Whatever level of success he achieves, the sculptor knows his work will last for ages.

“It’ll be around forever,” he said. “It’s made of the same stuff the ancient Egyptians used.”

Call 546-9882 to view or find out more about Jesse Salisbury’s work.