Featured Artist: Dalton Ghetti
PUBLISHED AUGUST 17TH, 2011
Born in Brazil, 49 year old Ghetti started carving from a young age using materials including stone, large piece of wood, soap, and broom handles.
“At school I would carve a friend’s name into the wood of a pencil and then give it to them as a present. Later, when I got into sculpture, I would make these huge pieces from things like wood, but decided I wanted to challenge myself by trying to make things as small as possible.” — DALTON GHETTI
Dalton Ghetti, now in Connecticut, USA, has been carving intricate graphite sculptures from pencils for about 25 years. Surprisingly, Ghetti doesn’t even use a magnifying glass, but instead uses a razor blade, sewing needle and sculpting knife. Each creation uses only one pencil.
A typical piece takes several months to complete but the longest project was the interlocking chains which took two and half years.
Sometimes a piece would break when he was almost finished it – he keeps more than 100 of these broken pieces in a box he calls, ‘the cemetery collection’. Of course he’d find it very upsetting to break a piece (especially near the end of a project), until he changed the way he thought about the creation process. He started thinking, “well this will break eventually but let’s see how far I get.” Interestingly, thinking this way helped him break fewer pencils.
Ghetti doesn’t sell his work but does give finished creations to friends. One day, he is hoping to have an exhibit in London.
More about Ghetti on Vimeo: Pencil Artist Dalton Ghetti
