Slate Artist Michael Updike | Open Studio

It starts as a ghost image—a dragonfly flitting across a fragment of slate. As Michael Updike leans in closer, he discards the white charcoal pencil he used to sketch the faint outline and reaches for a slender chisel and a small wooden mallet. I brace myself for the sound of nails on a blackboard. It’s so quiet here, at the edge of this shimmering salt marsh in Newbury, Massachusetts. Instead, there’s a soft and steady tap-tap-tap, like the sound of a raven rapping on glass. The dragonfly quickly emerges, first with basic scoring that intensifies the preliminary sketch; then in greater detail, as the chisel digs deeper, defining the body, giving depth and delicacy to the wings. Born from rough old stone, blooming like a fast-motion film, it feels no less miraculous than that real insect’s first flight.

“The wings give it life. It’s not how a real dragonfly wing is, but nobody thinks that,” Updike grins. “It’s a suggestion—they read it as real.”

Hints and suggestions, little stories rendered in stone. Hardly surprising for this artistic younger son of novelist John Updike—and therefore fitting that all of these elements came together in 2011 when Michael first carved an intricate gravestone for his father, to be placed as a memorial in Plowville, Pennsylvania, where Updike had lived as a teenager. (His ashes are buried in Manchester, Massachusetts.)

“I decided that slate would be a good motif for my father’s stone,” says Michael, 55, who had studied sculpture and earned an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. “It was a traditional New England material that would be traveling back to Pennsylvania—it kind of paralleled his life, which was from Pennsylvania but mostly Hawthornian New England. I carved his portrait as a soul effigy [an angel’s face flanked by wings, used on old gravestones]—it symbolizes a happy thought, that the soul is rising to heaven.”

Other personal touches followed: Tiny skeletons rising from the ground were a nod to Updike’s forgotten career as a cartoonist. Renditions of various signatures that marked different relationships in his life: “Johnny” to his parents; “jhu,” his cartooning signature; “Dad”; “Grandpa”; and, most formally, “John Updike.”

“The slate was very alluring because it was so immediate,” Michael recalls. “The end result was right in front of you. I really liked the physical act of designing it, carving it.”

Meanwhile, he was practicing on old slate shingles to get a deeper feel for the medium. And with these smaller wall hangings and decorative pieces, he gave himself license to simply make “a pretty object”—a fish, a crow, a seagull, a nest—focusing on material, texture, and carving, without much thought to the double meanings that often find their way into the gravestones that he also continues to create.

“They are what they are,” Michael says, of the smaller pieces scribed into roof tiles or shards of slate. “The tiles bear the scars, the paint drips, the tar, and the nail holes. In a way they’re relics of America’s past. On that piece of ‘found’ art I’m putting my own image.”

The slate is usurping his house. In the backyard, old school chalkboards overlook the salt marsh. Roof tiles lean against a garden wall. The garage is piled with boxes of slate fish, roosters, owls, and nests returning from one craft show and headed to the next. Larger pieces lurk nearby: A work-in-progress stone bench waits in the front yard (he works in granite, too); in the living room, a huge whale leans against the couch. Michael’s small studio, wedged between house and garage, spills over with chisels, hammers, saws, and drills. We hover over the workbench. Here, three tiles lie side by side, like serving platters, and a ghostly fish floats to the surface—head, middle, and tail.

“What you’re seeing, this was on a roof; the phantom part that’s whiter, that’s where it was covered,” he notes as he points intently. “And here’s where the joint between the two shingles was, dark.” The aged and mottled stone gives each carving its own shading. “They’re like unique pre-made canvases. And I’ll look at a piece and think, ‘That’s good for the squid; the squid will work well on this one.’”

Michael Updike’s smallest pieces sell for $50; roof tiles for $250. For more information, visit: michaelupdike.net