welcome

The sculptures I’ve carved over the last 40 years are poetry in stone to me. An English degree combined with my temperament and athleticism demanded a physicality that the written word alone could not address. Stone provided a tactility for sculptural metaphors. (Click on “Poetry In Stone” YouTube video above.)

Stone is the essence of the Earth and essentially I’ve been doing like humans have been doing since cave times, banging on rocks, and, by making organic shapes I have created work that shows inklings of my relationships with the primordial and the natural world.

poetry of stone

If there is a common thread running through Nick’s work, it is an elegance, a paring down of detail and a fascination with organic shapes and tactile quality.
“Amalgamations of Stone, Flesh and Flower” – Phil Schirmer
Leisure Weekly, 12 October 1989

Nick Santoro’s sculptures are the work of a master stoneworker, demonstrating very fine use of tools and materials to produce exquisite forms.
– Bear Miller, Fine Art Magazine, 28 August 2006

Beauty. Form. Voluptuousness. Evolutionary attractors. Nick’s attractors delight with the Great Worm … churning and twisting and exhaling in her earthly sea.
– Cameron Taylor

biography

I have been carving stone and making sculptures for forty years. During the 1990s I created a large body of stone, wood and metal sculptures at the old Vermont Marble Company site in West Rutland, Vermont. Carving daily at my studio on the quarry enabled me to experience a vivid connection with the men who had cut and shaped the stone. I learned to appreciate its elemental magnetism for our ancestors and for us. My work is an ongoing effort to fashion physical metaphors from the stone that connect our ancestors to us and our progeny. My art is organic, abstract and elemental.

bio & list of exhibitions (pdf)

poems & writings

THE KARVING WORKSHOP

Mission Statement Rutland is distinguished by its long marble history. The intention of The Karving Workshop is to introduce Rutland children and adults to its marble carving heritage. Many people living in Rutland are descendants of immigrants who worked in the marble quarries, marble mills, carving sheds and railroads. The Karving Workshop will be an …

selected work

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things … it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.
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constantine brancusi