Roger Hopkins: Beauty in the Basalt

   In the 1990s, Hopkins – then a Massachusetts-based landscape mason – headed off to faraway places with the Public Broadcasting System’s science program, Nova. On several programs, he helped raise stone in the fashion of Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Giza and an Egyptian obelisk.
   And, also on public television, Hopkins became one of those chummy fellows cheerily working away on landscape masonry for This Old House and Victory Garden. Like a veteran character actor, he gained plenty of recognition but not quite that tip-of-the-tongue fame.
   Hopkins dropped off the TV screen in the late 1990s and moved to the California desert to pursue his stone artistry, although calling his work sculptures may be misleading. The cut, chiseled and polished works, in various phases of rough-hewn and silky-smooth finishes, often have the odd combination of being abstract and practical.
   Hopkins also self-published Stoneworking, a book with insights about his work, his travels around the globe to investigate ancient stone methods, and a large helping of wry humor – including this opening disclaimer:
   “Warning! During my many years of working with stone, I have broken many bones, cut myself innumerable times, crushed my extremities, breathed an unhealthful amount of stone dust, ruined my eyesight, escaped death on several occasions, gained weight, and developed an unquenchable thirst for malt beverages. If none of the above appeals to you, I suggest you put this book down and go to the Self Help section.”
   Hopkins paused for a few questions in early summer at his studio, located in the back of a landscape stone yard on a desert hillside. Inside his office – a windowless, side-entry steel container – the main cooling system on a hot morning is a large thermos jug keeping some bottled water cold.
   “Welcome to my retirement,” he says.
  
   Q:What have you been working on lately?
   A: You just missed it by a day. We just shipped out two huge boulders that are going to St. Charles, Mo., featuring very Celtic carvings on them with interlocking swirls. One was about 11’ out of the ground, one was about 10’ and both were maybe 6’ across. They were 16,000 lbs each
   This month, when it’s really hot, we’ll set up and do these hot tubs, because it’s wet work and we want to get them done before the winter. These two halves out here were one boulder that I had wire-sawn at a Cold Spring quarry.
  
   Are these for local customers?
   We had one Saudi prince that was interested in one. We’ll ship anywhere; this year, we’ve shipped fountains to Virginia, carved stones to Missouri, Washington, Oregon. Wherever there’s money, we’re shipping stone – and where the stone fits into the landscape.
  
   What kind of stone are you using at this point?
   My philosophy is that you want to use stone in a particular landscape that tend to look like it belong there, because stone is the backbone of any garden. It’s the bones where you can flesh out a garden, so it has to look somewhat indigenous. You could use marble, but it doesn’t look right in the landscape, at least out here.
   So, you use most of the native granites. We use one local granite, and stone from the surrounding states. And, in the local area, we have beautiful boulders.
   It all tends to fit into the landscape. At first glance it looks like a rock; on closer inspection, you see the work we do to it. That’s the subtlety I look for in my work
  
   Is that “natural” look a lot of hard work?
   You have to have the eye to look at it and see if I do this to it, it will fit into the scene without being ostentatious, yet it will have some drama to it. I had a company in Massachusetts called Naturalistic Gardens, and I ran that for years. I always tried to take landscape and incorporate natural elements.
   I had a cousin that went back to Germany and did a background on our forefathers, and found out that one was a landscape architect in 1720, back when they were doing the contrived gardens at Versailles, and he was against that. He wanted to have more, as translated from the German, “naturalistic gardens” – and I’d named my business for that, prior to learning this information.
   His element was to use boulders and water features and other elements that would look natural in the landscape, and that was the business I was already doing. So it’s genetic.
  
   Do you have the image of a project in mind and look for a stone, or do you look at a stone and then get the image?
   From years and years of working in the landscape, I’ve noticed what is needed, and when I see a stone that can fulfill that need, I work on it. Sometimes, we have a happy coincidence where what I’ve created somebody else needs, but we have a lot of people come in there and look at the works (in the stone yard). At first, they were puzzled at the use of the work; for instance, a cocktail table that can be a fire pit, or it could be a fountain or any number of things, but it would fit into your landscape. And, then they’ll commission me to do something because what I have is too large or too small, and we’ll go from there.
  
   How did you get into doing the fire pits?
   Actually, I came from Boston, and you really don’t use the outdoors in the evenings that much, because you’re inundated with mosquitoes. Once I got out here, I could see that you live outdoors at night, so it wasn’t a great mind stretch that some evenings are chilly. I’d seen some very amateurish fire pits, and I figured this was something that could come out of the rock.
   My first one had the gas bubbling up from underneath the water, so the fire was dancing on the surface – it was very Macbethian. But, when the flame’s floating on the water, it’s hazardous and hard to keep lit.
   I recently did one that’s more than 5’ tall – it’s a 9,000-lbs stone that we put inside the house in a living room. It was a lot of fun.
   We’ve done several inside, along with sinks and bathtubs and tables. These are items that you could easily have fabricated in China; but, by the time you get them here, the stone doesn’t look native. And, they tend to work things there to perfection and it’s the little bumps and numps that I intentionally put on the stone that give it a very sensuous feel and adds a more-natural flavor to it.
  
   You seem to have a real attraction to upright stones. What brings you to that?
   This is human nature. You go back into any time in ancient history, and you’ll see that men have always been tumbling the stone upright. It’s a feeble way of conquering nature, or trying to get a handle on it. It also creates drama; the thing about stone is its strength and serenity, and when you balance it upright, it creates drama, and a sense of security and strength. Stone is such a huge element of the Earth that you want to use stone in a way that overwhelms you.
   I have this debate with so many sculptors that are pecking away at little tiny rocks, making these fine geometric shapes that are absolutely fantastic, but at the end of the day they don’t look like a rock anymore. They don’t look like stone. I use the words rock and stone interchangeably – I walk along a thin line there, but you want to stand next to a stone and feel some security, that I’m smaller than this. It brings you back into a relative place; it humbles you.
  
   Your work does have a sense of scale to it.
   If I had my druthers, I’d go even bigger. We have such damn small yards out there for houses. We actually worked on a project back East where they moved 300-ton boulders and set them for waterfalls.
  
   How did you end up in the desert?
   I like the desert. When you end up losing three to four months out of the year and you hear the furnace click on and you know you’re burning Saudi crude, it irks you that you can’t go out and do something to make a buck, and you’re spinning your wheels waiting for good weather. I like to work, and I like to work all the time, and the only place you can do that is here in the desert.
    It gets hot, but you can still work.. I’ve worked in upper Egypt where it was 140 degrees; you just dress up to the weather and react to the weather..
  
   Is this really your idea of retirement?
   If you don’t have a lot of money, you can’t retire, so you might as well keep plugging away, but you might as well do something that you enjoy doing. I’d be doing this anyway.
   It’s a natural to have an artist working in a stone quarry, or a stone yard. I think the retailers should consider that. Not only has it greatly enhanced the business here; it’s helped their clientele by being able to have small things done at a reasonable cost.
  
   Explain your portal series.
   There’s a subliminal thing going on there. When you have sculpture, you have to have air, because if you don’t, it’s hard to define it. It’s also something that it’s very difficult to achieve. You can find all kinds of meanings; every person can find a different one, like a journey through life or something like that. I’m not that philosophical about it, but I know I can look at a stone and say that it looks great if it has air. There are six of them out there now, and they’re scattered all over.
  
   How do you see architects and their feeling about stone?
   Over the years, I’ve done a lot of consulting work with architects; they want a presence of stone, but they really don’t understand how to work with it.. Not so much as with architects of, say, a century ago, because stone then was a ready, available and relatively inexpensive building material.
   I spend a lot of time with architects educating them in what they can do, and what they can’t do, and which stones would be better suited for a job, and ones that would be not desirable for that particular type of work. It’s a learning process and will generally lead to more work.
   But, I find that some architects have no clue; they have so many other things in their curriculum, and there’s such a plethora of material to learn about, and stone has kind of taken a back seat. It’s really not their fault.
   Now, others are very creative and they’ll come to you with something they want to try to create, and then they’ll back off and ask what you would do.
  
   Are you planning any more projects with historical stone?
   I did that over a course of nine years, and after a while you get frustrated. You draw some definitive conclusions on how things were done, and then the people making the show don’t want to listen to you. I know that in a couple shows I pointed out things that were as plain as the dirt on the ground, and they didn’t want to hear it because they have a protected interest in revisiting these subjects, and they don’t want to hear how it’s done and then that’s the end of the story.
  
   What have you taken away from the experience?
   You get a deep connection to having been around and investigated how these ancient stoneworkers actually worked, and you get a feeling of brotherhood with them. You get a respect for what they were trying to do, and you want to do your best; you’re fighting to bring some of this ancient megalithic works into present day, although you have to work within the confines of what people can afford. There aren’t many pharaohs around now to foot the bill.

Stoneworking by Roger Hopkins (ISBN 1-4116-1811-4) is available at his Website, www.rockartist.org.

This article first appeared in the September 2005 print edition of Stone Business. ©2005 Western Business Media Inc.