The Art of a Stone Mason

A swale, a curving gutter of stone meant to direct rainwater run-off, appears as a robust brushstroke across intersecting lanes.

A curved bench, cantilevered, hangs over a sinuous path. Curves and bends dominate in Brooks’ work. Straight lines are rigid and uninviting.

A simple children’s play space invites climbing and inspection. Brooks prides himself in combining function and grace in landscape sculptures built with ponderous materials and strenuous work.

As Brooks leads us through the Gardens on this beautiful autumn day, the changing trees dropped amber confetti on all below.

“This path, in a sense, is a dam. I built it to dam specifications. To be able to withstand lots of force.  This area is full of slurry and wetness. We wanted a serpentine path.  Would you rather paddle down a canal or down a river?  What’s around the next bend?”

Perhaps because he knows this article has an audience of paddlers, he frequently likens his work to streams and rivers.

“My name, Brooks, means water. My birth stone is aquamarine. There was an aquamarine mine on my grandfather’s property near Spruce Pine. I feel extremely connected to nature and water. This work is a bit of that coming out. The motion of water, the fluidity, the sense of connection to the land and water.”

“They allowed me to do this work, including the engineering, and it’s not cracked.  We’ve had these paths done for almost twenty years now.”

From the sturdiness and reassuring symmetry of an arched bridge, Brooks leads us to a extravagant floral mosaic. Brooks’ mosaics are some of his most eye-catching works, like this one featuring extensive carving to achieve an ornate design.

Brooks tries to balance a sensibility between aesthetic vibrance and an integration within the environment. This ornate design was achieved through extensive carving, a technique he sometimes shuns. He appreciates the creative opportunities in doing the lavish mosaics, but he seems a bit embarrassed by their ostentation.

Other works have a quieter, more contemplative style, using natural materials and minimal manipulation to blend with the surroundings. Sections of the Gardens serve as memorials. This contemplation area was dedicated by the family of a young woman who died.

“This mosaic has an infinity thing going and I’m not sure what that was to represent. This spiral. A lot of times we don’t know what the end product will be. Many paintings are like that. There is discovery in the process.”

There is a playful, inquisitive quality to much of Brooks’ work, such as this found-art mosaic. Burleson walks us through the congeries of scavenged materials sorted and shaped to form the mosaic.

“Look at all these colors. This is all leftover material. The stone in the middle came from a gravestone cutting place on Beryl Road in Raleigh. And there are all these granite remnants, these rose-colored remnants I ran across decades ago.”

“These were shingles that were salvaged from roof tops.  I think this is a New York slate…. It has a bluish gray color.  Also, we started working in materials that aren’t stone.”

“This reddish course came off demolished houses on Duke’s campus.  These were clay roof shingles. I wanted to do some carving too. I was doing stone carving in high school. I thought, we can do leaf petals.”

“I really like textural changes and this a massive textural change between the sculpted work of the petals and the shingles. I did all this carving of the stamens by hand, with a hand chisel. You can see.  This was my first petal…”

“I built more undulations into the later petals.”

The finding of materials and the incorporation of disparate elements is as much enjoyment for Brooks as the appreciation of the final piece, or the praise shed upon it. While Brooks does showier work, after all he is a free-lance craftsman hired by munificent patrons– such as Duke–he takes pride when his work seems to have evolved within the setting, with the plants and trees, the water courses and the undulations of the land , obviously touched by humans, but appearing natural, whole.

“I’m self-taught. That’s hard information to come by.  That’s how the Free Mason thing got started. You come up as an apprentice to a journeyman. You worked for the mason as a journeyman for five years or more. They weren’t going to give the information away.  You had to earn it.

In Europe, masons were in such demand they could move freely across borders. Free Masons are the world’s oldest fraternity and one of the oldest organizations in human history. Free Masons are committed to brotherly love, relief, and truth. They are also expected to better themselves, their community, and the world.”

Brooks clearly enjoys this distinction, this dedication to a craft that values enduring works and benefits to society. Masons are in a sense, crusaders for art, for stability, for revealing something about simple materials, skillfully used, creating a work that lasts beyond a generation, beyond the “build-it, tear-it-down, build something else” roundabout of modern life.

“Duke has allowed me to dive back into traditional, historical, enduring types of projects.  Like dry walling. I’ve done some of my best dry walls here.  Structurally they are very sound. Dry wall means no mortar.  That’s where the true mason’s craft is. Mortar is sort of a band-aid.  You can stick anything together with mortar.”

Brooks points to one of his more practical constructions, a wall.  “You’ll notice the coping on this wall is a more European style wall cap, like you will see in Scotland and Ireland. The cutting of the stone is done with a template, to make them consistent. In Europe you’ll find different styles of coping. I wanted this to be more refined. I used a template to make them all the same. In Europe you’ll see where they don’t tool them at all.”

So, what at first appears as a simple wall, is an intricately assembled jigsaw of loose stone topped by caps carefully shaped to give a steeple effect.

Brooks continued to show us through the gardens. Duke Gardens is large, 55 acres of botanical splendor, an oasis on a bustling campus of a private university.

“We’re in the Asiatic Garden. This is more formalized work.  I cut all these notches into the center millstone, trying to breathe life into it.”

“This is polygonal work, one of the oldest styles.  Lots of Peruvian work is polygonal. I had a rule, all angles greater than 90 degrees. An apprentice ran with some of it, and he had a couple of slips.  He said, “Where, Where?”

“I went to Europe where everything is weathered.  I wanted my work to look weathered, so I crowned the edges.  Done with a grinder, then a polish cloth. We didn’t want to use saws with this work.  All hand tools.  It’s already started growing moss.  I love it.”

Much of Burleson’s work is based on using non-mechanized ways of moving or shaping stone. The hand-grinding and polishing mentioned but also the moving of very large stones by use of levers, rollers, or sleds. Sometimes this is done because the site is unreachable by larger machines. Other times it’s the novelty and craft of knowing a work was done entirely by human power and ingenuity.

“I started out just moving 300lbs stones. Then, I had a client where I was moving 3000-4000lbs stones to their house with sleds and rollers. At my house, I have three stones that make a 30ft. wall, about 3 ft. tall.  Three stones.  One was 6500lbs., the next was 4500llbs, the last was 10,000 lbs. I had to engineer a railway system for the sleds and rollers.”

This is the pavilion at Piedmont Prairie. The structure, an outdoor classroom, was designed by Ellen Cassily, an architect noted for the environmental integration of her designs, one of the many like-minded people Brooks works with on projects.

“All of this stonework was done by me, with rollers and levers. Ellen’s house sits on New Hope Creek.  I also did the stonework there.”

Burleson seems to enjoy the engineering of his projects as well as the artistry: the design of elaborate supportive forms used to hold stone structures under construction, the time-tested but exacting use of levers and sleds, the forethought and understanding needed to make massive works that remain solid and unmoved after years of use. Still, there’s a twinkle of an artist’s eye revealed in quiet ways….

“Here I’m starting to go beyond the background. More weird stuff in the background. Also trying to be three dimensional but working in two dimensions.  You’ll see the pedals are slightly raised against the background.”

“I wanted the petals to look like they are overlapping. You’ll notice, one petal dies beyond the next. That’s me, messing around. And in the center….”

It’s clam shells. I frequent the coast. I was sitting on the beach at Cape Lookout. It’s not just any clam shells, it’s clam shells that have been weathered and tumbled for the last 5000,10,000 years. They accumulate on the beach during certain current conditions. They pile up. They’re all broken but also tumbled and rounded. I thought this is just what I need. They have a thickness unlike a jagged, sharp, new clam shell.”

“You’ll see here I’ve allowed my subject to come out of the frame. This was the influence of Alponse Mucha. Mucha was a Czech artist in the early 1900’s. He used a lot of spheres and circles.”

“I used to go to this head shop over at Crabtree Valley back in the 70’s and 80’s and they would sell incense and bongs and pipes and hippie stuff.”

“Alphonse Mucha posters were there.  Alphonse Mucha produced posters in the style of Art Nouveau.  Early 1900’s. He incorporated this framework of spheres into his work.”