A brush with JESSE SALISBURY

Pounding rocks sounds like an activity suggested by a grumpy father to his bored child, but Maine native Jesse Salisbury has turned pounding, drilling, carving, blasting and sanding rocks into an art. Salisbury was a kid in Steuben when he started noticing rocks. But it wasn’t until he went to a sculpture symposium in Japan that he found his true calling. First as an apprentice and then as an artist, he worked on large, outdoor rock sculptures transforming them into monumental outdoor glyphs. His work – look for “Fruit” on permanent display at the Bartlett Maine Estate Winery in Gouldsboro – includes “Seed” (shown here) featured in “Touchstones: Sculpture Participating with Place,” a group show through September at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. Once, when Salisbury came upon a 20-ton boulder, he split it more than 500 times and then rebuilt it as four jutting towers each containing jags of the original behemoth. Angles of light shoot through, around and into it. Beyond are the trees, shrubs, the sky and eternity itself. One of his friends called the unnamed piece an “alien Stonehenge.” It also looks like a pendant for a fairytale giant or a gray-flecked musing on form, texture and the efficacy of glaciers. “In Japan, the material is expensive,” said the 33-year old Colby College graduate. “Back home, I could afford to experiment, which allowed me to explore this technique of splitting.” Salisbury’s work attire includes: a tuniclike head covering, goggles, a respirator, steel-toed boots and heavy-cloth clothing. He uses rock drills (think: construction site), wedges, chisels, hammers, physics and mathematical calculations to find the “character” of a slab of granite or basalt from Addison, Sullivan, Jonesboro and a quarry on his own property. “I like people to have the Jesse Salisbury whole rock experience,” said the artist standing in his open-air studio, which also happens to be the yard of his family’s house. Plans are under way for a major rock event in 2007, when Salisbury will host a six-week international sculpture symposium in conjunction with Schoodic Arts for All and the National Park Service at the Schoodic Education and Research Center, a former Navy base at Schoodic Point. It’s hard work, but somebody’s got to do it.

– Alicia Anstead