By Richard Turner

Sometimes, our stones speak to us in unexpected ways. This piece of limestone and chert, which was probably collected in China, recently surprised me. I was initially attracted to it because it suggested a worn cliff face marbled with layers of caramel and black sediment. During the time I spent with the stone, thinking about the design of an appropriate base, it became something entirely different. It transformed into the profile of a demonic beast bent on death and destruction. It had an overhanging brow, a prominent nose, lips stretched into a broad grimace around a mouthful of fangs and clenched teeth, and blunted horns protruding from its head.

Although I knew that this horror-movie vision was simply a product of my imagination projecting a fantastic image onto the screen of the stone, I resolved to work with the unwelcome hallucination. Which is where the title Ars Longa, Vita Brevis came from. The phrase is a Latin translation of Hippocrates’ aphorism, which means “acquiring skill takes time and life is short”. If this stone, at least in my own imagination, had become a symbol for death, then the base had to be a symbol for art, hence the painter’s palette. I decided to use this startling reminder of my mortality as an excuse to renew my commitment to spending time in my studio “acquiring skill.” In the following two weeks, I designed displays for eleven stones.