I always say that a creative soul sees possibilities where no one else can. I rediscovered the meaning of that this week when I met Franco Minervini. He immigrated to the U.S. with his parents as a teenager and became a master stone carver. He transforms blocks of limestone creating such things as gargoyles for the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. or the reason that I interviewed him, September 11th monuments for communities in New Jersey and New York.
This is the first stone carver I’ve interviewed for ON THE SCENE. We’ve had sculptors of all sorts, even a blacksmith once, but never an artist who brings stone to life. Minervini looks at a square of limestone and can see how he can chisel, file, and sand it into an image of the human body, or a soaring eagle, or the face of a monster. He does it at his studio in Freehold, New Jersey, so covered in lush ivy you could mistake the small building for a hedge and drive right by. It’s quite a visual inside, too, Minervini mesmerized as he chisels away, dressed in denim overalls and red t-shirt.
I asked him, “is there anything you haven’t done that you still want to?”
“Yes,” his eyes lit up. “Bruce Springsteen. I want to carve Springsteen!”
That would explain the double life size poster of The Boss in concert leaning against his studio wall, a pose Minervini hopes to replicate someday…when he makes stone, rock.
