Jarrett Tishmack is a worker and doesn’t mind the title. As a general contractor specializing in custom tile, he might even prefer it—to his ears, artist sounds a bit lofty.
But Tishmack studied marble sculpting in Pietrasanta, Italy, near the ancient quarries of Carrara, where craftsmen have been cutting stone since Roman times. The old timers here used to come out of the factories covered in marble dust to drink coffee on the town square, before returning to their hammers and chisels, a daily routine.
“Think about people doing this work for thousands of years, building cathedrals, statues, fountains. It’s romantic to imagine,” Tishmack says. “But they were just working people, really good at what they did.”
The apocryphal saying from St. Francis of Assisi goes: He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands, his head, and his heart is an artist.
As for his own work, Tishmack takes a humble approach. “Cutting marble tile isn’t far from sculpting marble.” Which leaves the question: what distinguishes craft from art, where does the heart come in?
When one opens a box of tile, an expectation exists that the material has gone through some kind of quality control, a uniform product delivered; the same can’t be said for raw stone, bound to become a sculpture.
When he needs material, Tishmack heads to Colorado’s high country and the town of Marble. The famous quarry here supplied the stone for both the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Remnants from large-scale projects litter the roadside, and the deal is that if you can haul it, you can have it—no easy task at one hundred seventy pounds per cubic foot.
Known to be of great quality by world standards, these blocks of Yule marble still require a certain collaboration when working it. Tishmack describes the process as exploring what the stone has to offer. “You just have to find what’s already there,” he says. “By not imposing your will, you’ll be led in ways you didn’t intend. It’s a conversation.”
Figurative in nature, his pieces rely on suggestion with their movement and form, leaving ample room for the sculptures to speak for themselves. And lately, he’s been bringing other material into dialogue with the stone.
Combining black walnut with marble in his piece Life Finds a Way, Tishmack explains: “It’s the wood that weaves through the stone, which speaks exactly to what those materials are in nature. Stone is slower, its permanence greater. It decides the pace.”
That characteristic is what keeps drawing Tishmack, despite his love for woodworking, back to stone. “Humans have been pecking at rock faces and making stone tools for a long time,” he says. “But I don’t think I’m preserving anything. I’m just participating. I still think of myself as a tile guy who happens to carve marble.”
Asked why someone should buy his sculptures, Tishmack first expresses more of his trademark humility. Then adds: “If you don’t own a stone sculpture, you don’t know how it feels. A stone sculpture is powerful, like it’s meant to occupy the space. You don’t own an object, you own an experience. It’s the Earth inside your house.”
Returning to the question of when does craft become art, perhaps the answer simply takes a sculptor with enough heart to engage in conversation with a raw piece of stone until everyone else can hear it, too. After all, this has carried forward the tradition for thousands of years—and even if he won’t admit it, one kept up by a tile setter in Boulder.
Find Jarrett Tishmack’s work at TishmackDesign.com.