Rock of Ages
Sculptor Marvin Ellis, age 85, carries boulders from the mountains, preserving his own memories and a bit of history in the art he carves from rock.
Story and photos by Donna Clayton Lawder
"My inspiration? I'd have to say that comes from the rock itself," says Marvin Ellis. At home in his little place in the mountains, he's a mountain of a man himself—not so much in terms of size, but in the sense of permanence, solidity, quiet power.
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Sculptor Marvin Ellis in his studio. |
Though modest in stature, the 85-year-old Ellis commands attention with his solid presence and clear-eyed, steady gaze. The delivery of his words is measured, thoughtful. As he speaks, he turns a baseball-sized stone over and over, the tan of his work-roughened hands nearly matching the red-brown striations in the rock.
"It looks like us, like New Mexico," he says of the rock. "That's why I use it. It's our colors. It's our textures."
For 20-some years now, Marvin Ellis has been creating historical, representational art in stone—chuckwagons, covered wagons, Native American hogans and ancient cliff dwellings, scenes of Western life.
"I know what I'm going to make when I see what I've got," he says. He explains how the colorful bands within the boulders, revealed when he begins cutting them up, suggest to him where the pieces of rock should go, what part they will play in his creation, what they want to become. And sometimes, too, he's had to go back into the mountains to find just the perfect rock he needs to complete a piece.
Ellis' studio in the northwestern corner of Grant County has become something of a gallery. In between the cans of chemicals and glass jars chock full of diamond-tipped tools, his worktable is covered with works-in-progress and completed pieces—a pair of spurs, wagon wheels, a perfectly round stone orb, an ear of corn with rows of perfect little kernels. A shelf above the table holds just a small sampling of the gem and mineral jewelry he's produced over the years.
He coaxes the figures he carves out of rocks and stones he lugs down from the mountains by hand, some weighing a hundred pounds or more. He's often accompanied by his daughter, Cynthia Luna, whom he is teaching to create rock art of her own.
And like many a rock hound, Ellis won't disclose where he finds his rocks. Asked if they come from the mountains near his home, he just smiles a tight-lipped smile.
Born in Hurley, Ellis says he was raised "pretty much in Silver City" and also lived in Texas and Colorado, working as a professional upholsterer for much of his career. Though his work was satisfying, and even somewhat artistic, he always "tinkered with art."
He founded The Royal Scepter, a gem and mineral shop (now owned and operated by Kevin Cook and Sylveen Robinson-Cook) when he moved back to Silver City. The business became a way for him to share his appreciation of the beauty of rocks and stones.
Now he has retired to Mule Creek, a friendly small town that reminds him of the quieter, slower pace of his childhood. And so, for the two decades or so, detailed carved rock art has been Ellis' passion and daily occupation.
Though he made gem and mineral jewelry for years, these days he does it only by special request and for friends. He is one of only a handful of artisans who works with fire agate, a mineral that is both very hard and very delicate. Carving fire agate properly reveals the fiery luster within the stone, but one wrong blow can cause it to shatter. He currently is teaching an apprentice how to handle fire agate.
Ellis also sometimes makes perfectly smooth, round rock spheres. The bands of color from the striations in the rock make the orbs seem like distant, imaginary planets. He describes the process of taking the raw rock and giving it several dozen precisely angled cuts, then tumbling the stone completely smooth in a machine he built with his late brother. One bad cut, one slightly off angle, and the rock won't tumble round but will turn out lopsided.
But Ellis says his only theme these days is "the history of America."
"I want to preserve history," he says, walking between the small tables and makeshift pedestals holding his work. "These are things from my childhood, images I recall," he adds, gesturing toward an old homestead, a windmill for watering cattle. He rests his hand gently on the top of one of his carved covered wagons. "This was a way of life and I don't want it to be forgotten."
Ellis' work has been shown at numerous galleries and shows, including juried shows at the Mimbres Region Arts Council's gallery in the Wells Fargo bank building and Western New Mexico University's McCray Gallery, both in Silver City. Last Day in Paradise, also in Silver City, has carried his work. His wagons and other icons of the Old West are displayed and sold at the Casitas de Gila Guesthouses in Gila and Running Horse Gallery in Pleasanton.
He has participated in the annual Cliff Art Fair for several years now, where he says his work always sells well.
"I've never had a problem selling it," Ellis says with a humble shrug and smile. He gestures toward an earth-toned piece on a small makeshift pedestal. "That's my 21st wagon right there."
The chuckwagon, looking weathered and old, is made of dozens and dozens of bits of stone, from cream to red-brown in color. The cloth stretched over the stone frame is frayed, as it might well be in a real-life Old West wagon, exposing the ribs of rock beneath. The wagon sits on a handcrafted platform, sporting a cactus and other bits of scenery also made from individually carved and polished rocks.
His presentation in the Cliff Art Fair last year was an American timeline of sorts, icons of the Old West made into artistic dioramas, if you will, lives and lifestyles painstakingly carved and polished, preserved in stone. In his pictorial history—reading right to left, ancient to present day—cliff dwellings of the ancient Native Americans gave way to Indian hogans, then mining scenes followed by Western scenes depicting the lives of pioneers, cowboys, settlers.
Ellis goes over to a low table along one wall and picks up one of his cliff-dwelling pieces. The greenish, rough rock on the front seems almost untouched, depicting the mountain into which the recessed red-brown dwelling structure is carved. He looks at the piece, an almost whimsical expression on his face, as if he'd just come across the scene and was reflecting on the lives of its inhabitants, perhaps pondering the ancient hands that carved a home into the mountainside.
Asked what he'd carve to follow the covered wagons and Western scenes, Ellis shakes his head. "I don't know."
At the suggestion of modern American life, including highways and cities, he frowns slightly, shakes his head. "No, I have no interest in that."
Ellis' "artist's statement" as to why he creates art is simple: "It keeps me busy," he says with a small smile. "It's something to think about, to plan. I like working things out. It's like solving a puzzle."
He gestures toward the cattle-watering windmill he's carved. With its airy framework of light red-brown slats going up and deeper rust vanes at the top, the structure looks like the real deal in a field somewhere, weathered by years in the sun, wind and seasonal rains. The carved windmill, a foot or so tall, sits on a piece of heavy white paper, the light coming in through the real-life window behind it casting the structure's shadow clearly at its base.
His plan, Ellis says, is to build a base for the windmill, with its shadow depicted in a mosaic of lighter and darker stones.
"I want to get that shadow right. I'll trace it," he says. "Then I can create it in stone in the base, just how the shadow would be thrown, you know?"
Attention to detail is one of Marvin Ellis' strong suits. One of his chuckwagons has individually carved, removable barrels and crates, tiny re-creations of Old West rations being transported across the prairie. Another piece, a wheelbarrow, holds a host of painstakingly detailed fruits and vegetables. He holds up a wheel, soon to be affixed to a covered wagon in progress.
"As I got better, I made more spokes," he says with a smile. "This is more realistic." He describes how he carves each of the dozen or so spokes, sands them smooth, then sets them into the perfectly round wheel, affixing them all with epoxy at the outside joints and at the tiny hub in the center. He turns the wheel over to show the glued portions. "Once it is sandblasted," he says, "you won't even see the glue." He picks up another wheel, further along in the process, and shows the perfect joints. Indeed, not a dot of glue is visible.
Bases take a lot of time, he says. It ain't easy getting all those little pieces to fit into each other, to coax them into becoming a flat and level mosaic of light and shadow to hold the sculpture that will be placed on them in the end.
Patience, surely, is another of his strong points. Ellis estimates it takes him at least a month, working every day, to complete one wagon, his favorite subject, he says.
"The first thing you have to teach any student of this art is patience," he says. He picks up one of his wagons, number 21, and turns it, eyeing it from every angle. "You can't hurry this."
To describe the process of going from a 100-pound boulder he's lugged down out of the hills to the finished piece of art, Ellis leads the way out to a garage where his big tools are housed. First the rocks are cut into slabs with a huge diamond-toothed saw. He points out a mud-splattered metal box—coated with remnants of the spray of water and fine rock—that houses a saw blade of considerable size.
The rocks are then cut into smaller and smaller pieces with other tools—drills and the like. He picks up a one-pint glass canning jar filled with drill bits.
"That's about a thousand dollars worth of tools right there," he says.
After getting the rock cut up into manageable pieces, he sandblasts to take off sharp edges and remove softer bits of the rock. Some rocks he tumbles just a bit in the tumbling machine, too, an odd-looking gizmo with an appearance not unlike a moon rover.
Having cut the rocks into manageable pieces, he then begins the painstaking construction of his artwork. He sometimes works from sketches, other times simply from an image in his head.
Marvin Ellis steps out of the garage, blinking into the sunlight of the day. He picks up a nearby hose, starts washing off small rocks in a wheelbarrow, and gazes across his yard at the windmill standing in the field just across the road.
He ponders the landscape, the mountains in the distance, and how rocks from the New Mexico hills yield the rocks that help him preserve something of the landscape that they themselves surround.
Asked if that would be these very hills that yield his rocks, Ellis smiles that tight-lipped smile again that seems to say, "I ain't saying nothin'." He looks down at the rocks he's washing in the wheelbarrow, then looks up and bids a friendly good-bye.
Donna Clayton Lawder is senior editor of Desert Exposure.