How to Select Stones for Navajo Sculpting, Part 1

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Roy Walters Jr. I am a Native American Artist. I do sculpture and painting, and I am here on behalf of Expert Village. Stones that come from Utah. They are calcite stones. This is what they call honeycomb calcite. It gets really yellow. It's really translucent. It's a very good rock. It's one of the best materials out there; high quality. And then we use these bases. They're just like end pieces from these tabletop places, these quarries that sell and install tabletops for homes and businesses. These are just the end pieces. They just get rid of it, and so we take those and we make bases from them. This is granite. And then we have the marble. This is from Italy; it comes from Italy. We also get marbles from Colorado. They're very hard stones; different ways to cut it and approach it. Some of this is Portoroz marble. It comes from Italy. Very hard stone. It takes diamond to cut it, and hammer and chisels. Some of it is so flaky that it's best just to grind it. We got stones from Portugal. This is from Portugal. Pink Portugese marble. As you can see, this is a sculpture yard, so it's not a place where it's going to be nice and clean and spiffy. It's going to be dirty all the time."