It's official, graphite sculptor Dalton Ghetti is actually the most patient man in the world. Not only does he sculpt his masterpieces in intricate detail but also chooses to so on one of the most fiddly and fragile materials you could think of, the tip of a pencil. His love of the sculptural form began with him carving friends names into pencil wood at school. Now, at 49 years of age he can spend months and years even on his pieces but as you can imagine there have been a few casualties. He actually has a box of over 100 sculptures that never made it which he calls
the cemetery collection.
"It would drive me mad when I would be just a bit too heavy handed and the pencil's tip would break. I would get very nervous sometimes, particularly when the piece was almost finished, and then I would make a mistake. I decided to change the way I thought about the work - when I started a new piece my attitude would be 'well this will break eventually but let's see how far I get. It helped me break fewer pencils, and although I still do break them, it's not as often"
Since 2002 he's been working on a piece of epic proportions inspired by the September 11 attacks. Every day he carves a teardrop into a pencil with the intention to have one for each of the people that died in the attack. The 3000 teardrops with form one big tear drop... wow right? At his current rate he believes it will take about 10 years to complete.
Click on the thumbnails above to view samples of his miniature works.