Sometimes big ideas are actually very small. You’ll never look at a pencil the same after you see what Dalton Ghetti sees.
Dalton Ghetti takes months, even years, to meticulously carve tiny sculptures out of pencil graphite. The artist, who is a carpenter and volleyball coach by day, says the process starts with sketches on paper. Then he selects one of the many discarded pencils he finds on the street, whittles away some of the wood, and starts sculpting the exposed graphite. He might drop a project for a while and come back to it.
“I don’t do it every day,” he says. “I can’t work more than an hour or hour and a half. My eyes get tired.” It’s a wonder he can do it that long, given the focus and fine control involved in using sewing needles and modified scalpels—and aided only by reading glasses and a strong light—to create, say, a tiny graphite hammer or boot. And then there’s the fact, as anyone who has over-sharpened a pencil knows, that graphite breaks.
“I usually start a piece knowing it’s going to break—that takes the anxiety and stress out of the work,” says Ghetti, who lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He began the pencil sculptures not long after migrating to the United States from Brazil in 1985 at the age of 24.
‘Screw,’ graphite and wood | Photo by Sloan T. Howard
“I’m having more success lately than I did 10 or 15 years ago,” he says, “I think because I changed the way I work. I’m more relaxed now. Before, I was a little too tense trying not to break [the graphite]. Anytime something breaks, I learn a lesson from it. I’ll try to create the same piece again, and when I come to the part where it broke, I’m more careful.” Ghetti has even learned to control his breathing while sculpting, lest his heartbeat perturb the precision of his hands.
His work currently appears in the Springfield Museums’ Leaving Our Mark: In Celebration of the Pencil, an exhibition of 15 artists who work in graphite that runs through March 2016 in Springfield, Massachusetts. His sculptures have also exhibited recently in Turkey, Canada, and Baltimore as well as at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut.
Ghetti sells postcards and posters of his artwork, but the sculptures themselves are not for sale. His art is purely personal, not commercial, he explains. “When I’m inspired, it’s wonderful.” But, he adds, “It’s a hobby. I work for a living.”