Tackling a 30-tonne block of marble with his bare hands doesn’t faze Paul Vanstone – ‘I do like that broader, bigger brushstroke,’ says the sculptor who makes his mark on onyx, alabaster and finest Carrara...
Sculptor Paul Vanstone’s road to producing highly accomplished, highly prized – not to mention highly collectable – carvings in marble, onyx and alabaster began back in his childhood.

The 53-year-old’s family are from Devon, although due to his father’s work as a scientist, they moved around a lot.

‘Because he was brought up on Dartmoor,’ begins Vanstone, ‘he always wanted to get to the mountains. He was always outwardbound, never wanted to live anywhere near a city.’ So, for his son, ‘rocks and rock climbing’ were an early passion. ‘And that aligned with loving to make things. That was my youth. Those led me here.’

Here, today, is his studio and yard in Scrubs Lane, northwest London. When I arrive on a warm late summer’s afternoon, the rumble of traffic from adjacent arterial roads is competing with the whirr of the nine-inch angle grinder with a flush-cut diamond blade that Vanstone is taking to a block of Carrara marble. Emerging from the stone is the beginnings of an imposing muscled torso, two or three metres square.
The first step of this work involved Vanstone, as it pretty much always does, deep in a quarry – this one in the Tuscan town that gives its name to the famous marble, prized since Roman times – with his boots on the ground, hands on the rockface, feeling out the stone for himself. The next stage in this work’s two-month carving process will involve Vanstone downing the power-tools and picking up his hammer, chisel and set-square.

‘The angle-grinder is a great way of blocking out the shape and removing the waste before you start using the hand tools. Oddly, I was taught by a guy who didn’t believe in using power tools. But he just worked in English limestone, which is much softer. As soon as you want to work in marble, you’d be there all year using just hand tools!’ the hearty, gregarious Vanstone laughs.

‘It is pretty basic. I don’t think my tools have changed that much in 30 years of carving,’ he admits, his skin and clothes ghosted in a fine coat of white marble powder. ‘All the robots and stuff is coming in, but that’s not for me. It’s about the markmaking, the decision-making. I can see its use for copying things, but programming a
robot as a starting point, that doesn’t work with the way I work. I’m a direct carver.’
Positioned around this dusty space are assorted other outsized, beautifully crafted body parts: giant heads, towering figurines, looming faces. There are, too, other faces and figures in various states of completion. But right now he’s focusing on this masculine chest, a commission for a large house and garden in Wiltshire. He has a book of classical Greco-Roman statuary open as a reference.

‘I haven’t carved a male torso for eight, nine years,’ he explains, so a nudge of inspiration was required. In fact, the last he carved was of Lawrence Dallaglio. The sister of the retired England rugby player died in the 1989 Marchioness disaster on the Thames, ‘and he has quietly raised money for the people left behind,’ says Vanstone. ‘So I did some pieces [of him] for a charity auction. I love sport,’ adds this man who could himself be taken for a prop forward. ‘And I had this beautiful marble from the Himalayas which had this tight, muscle-packed veining to it, which just fitted with his physique.’

Vanstone studied sculpture at Central St Martins School of Art. Then it was on to the Royal College of Art, where he received his Masters of Fine Art in 1993. His fellow students included the Chapman brothers and Gavin Turk: ‘That generation where it was more about ideas. That was the most liberating thing – I could pick up the actual techniques later on.’
Post-college, those techniques were honed on the ground, first in northern Italy and then in Rajasthan, both major centres of quarrying, ‘working in marble, in workshops. After a certain point it’s self-education.’

But before he had even graduated Vanstone’s work was attracting interest and buyers – the wife of CNN founder Ted Turner purchased a piece from his Royal College show.

‘They had a big British figurative art collection. She came to the show with a wonderful woman from Pietrasanta, which is a big carving area,’ he says of the Tuscan coastal town, whose quarries were a favourite of Michelangelo. ‘And she let me have a studio there. That was my first year out of the Royal College. I made things for them, and worked alongside assistants who’d worked for Henry Moore and the Gucci family. So, really interesting people.’

Then he landed a job as an assistant to Anish Kapoor, ‘before he became mega-big. We had a really good working relationship and I loved working for him. We’d go off to Italy and India, choosing materials and blocks. For me, it still always starts in the quarry – I love to spend a week in a quarry!’ he laughs again.
‘It’s a natural material
and there is no way
of properly X-raying
a block of stone. So it
could have a fault inside
it. You have to adapt’It is, from start to finish, all about the touch, but also instinct and experience.

‘It’s a natural material and there is no way of properly X-raying a block of stone. So it could have a fault inside it. I’m on the edge of buying a 24-tonne block of marble from Portugal, a beautiful, creamy, warm colour, from a place called Estremoz, near the Spanish border. Lovely people, lovely quarry – I’ve been buying from them for 17-odd years. But you never know: they’ve definitely sold me blocks with cracks in – not intentionally – and you have to adapt.

‘That’s why going into the quarry, and talking to the guys down there – not the salesman, not the owner – is important.’

He hit the ground running in terms of working at large scale, too. With Kapoor, ‘I was making three-metre pieces and we worked on 30- and 40-tonne blocks of stone. It was a group effort, working as part of a team, which I found really interesting. I’ve loved having assistants and working closely with them.’

After five years, when his daughter (who has just turned 18) was born, he decided it was time to go it alone. ‘I thought: if I stay here, I’m gonna be here for a long time.’
Luckily, he didn’t want for commissions. These days he has a regular client base who ‘like big statement pieces. And you seduce them, one way or another. I like making pieces in all sorts of sizes, and as I get older I feel like I’m getting a little bit smaller. But I do like that broader, bigger brushstroke. Everyone has their ego.’

He does some pieces for public bodies and public spaces – he’s about to do ‘a really big one’ in White City in west London, while a pair of Henry Moore-esque figurines in his yard were destined for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. ‘I’d say about 85 per cent [of my sales are to] private individuals,’ he says. These, clearly, are people with big houses and big gardens. ‘And some of them collect a lot of my work, which has been tremendous. It’s given me stability in what can be a chaotic market. It’s allowed me to get better at what I do.’

He’s currently working on a piece that will cost its buyer £100,000, although at the lower scale his works sell for £6,000 or £7,000. ‘I don’t do many pieces a year. I always thought I was quite affordable for people – but probably not in these times,’ he acknowledges with a smile.

Luckily, his order book remains healthy. Most of the pieces shown on these pages have been sold.
‘About 85 per cent
of my sales are to
private individuals.
It’s given me stability
in a chaotic market.
It’s allowed me to get
better at what I do’The reclining figure in Carrara marble has gone to a garden in Cheltenham, created by award-winning designer Kate Gould, where it is ‘surrounded by beautiful Japanese trees’.

Of the two blocks of stone pictured previously, resting on top of each other, the bottom one is ‘a blood-red, very hard Tuscan marble that I’ve not touched yet. It’s like granite! I’m not a masochist, and this is a painful process. But it’s a great colour, which is probably why I bought it.’

And, on top, the remains of some pieces he installed in Stella McCartney’s flagship store in Old Bond Street, Mayfair, when it opened in summer 2018. That was a project in partnership with Britannicus Stone – who supplied the material – and with the architect and store managers.
‘As fashion is,’ he says, ‘it was a very in-the-moment thing, they’re making [fast] decisions. But also there was this long-term vision of making something of real quality.’

As for the pair of ‘almost kissing’ silhouettes, which were a previous Chelsea Flower Show placement, they were sold to a buyer on Guernsey, where they now
complement an avenue of trees.

‘It’s big and imposing – those are five tonnes each – but it’s intimate. I never think of my work as corporate because it feels too personal,’ Vanstone reflects. ‘Making pieces for people and it becoming part of their lives – that’s what I love.’ paulvanstone.co.uk
WORDS CRAIG MCLEAN | PHOTOGRAPHS JAKE CURTIS | CREATIVE DIRECTOR KATIE PHILLIPS