By Stephen Barling
Crouched in the back of his battered Ford pickup truck at Ix Art Park, Toru Oba is wrestling a worn yellow strap around a 5-foot-long, 400-pound hunk of raw sandstone. “I used to move these by myself,” he says, “but now I need help.”
The 79-year-old Japanese stonemason and sculptor can be forgiven if he no longer scales scaffolding with one hand while lugging his tools in the other. He’s remarkably fit for his age—or someone half his age. You have to be, to dominate the brute inertia of soapstone, sandstone, and granite.
Oba’s sculptures, which can be found around Charlottesville—notably in front of the McGuffey Art Center and at Ix Art Park—often range from one to several tons each. The gray and black stone blobs laze in the sun, their polished surfaces inviting visitors to run a hand along a smooth groove or poke a head through a carved hole.
The inscrutable works invoke a sense of creative, playful space. At McGuffey, picnickers sit down to a meal on a large smooth block while children play around them on the grass. At Ix, Oba is immersed in creating several new works. The park has agreed to host the pieces, offering staff and equipment to assist in moving the enormous chunks of stone while he coaxes them into their final shapes. All other labor and expenses—trucking in stones, equipment, and resources—are his.
It is no small feat. An Ix worker brings a forklift to raise the spike by its strap and slowly dangle it into a hole bored in the side of a stack of vaguely bone-shaped sandstone. Oba guides the chunk by hand, arranging wood planks into a platform for refining the stone while he finesses it into its final position using levers, straps, and chains. This one element will take days to add to the sculpture.
Sculpting is a largely improvisational process for Oba, who says he starts with an idea of what the final work will look like, but the stones themselves dictate what becomes of them. “Some artists carve a block down to a shape, but I use the shape of the stone to give me ideas.” The result might be a stout black pyramid or a tall multi-textured gurgling fossil. One sculpture at Ix suggests an oversized pixelated stone rabbit.
He hasn’t always felt so free to create what inspires him. After settling in Nelson County in 1986 with his wife, Oba began contracting work as a mason, building patios, stairs, and chimneys. Things changed in 1999 when he was hired to build the entry to Dave Matthews Band saxophonist LeRoi Moore’s Japanese-architecture-inspired mountaintop dream house.
As the entry’s stone stairs progressed, Oba says Moore asked, “Is that it? Can you do something a little ‘more?’” Thus began a multi-year project designing and installing stone gardens, paths, and patios around the property. With Moore’s encouragement, Oba incorporated sculptural elements into masonry all over the hillside.
“It was the best job I ever had,” Oba insists. The only limitations placed on him were set by Moore’s groundskeeper who demanded he use no heavy machinery so as not to disrupt the landscaping. “That’s how I learned to move these large stones by hand.”
After finishing the work at Moore’s property, Oba continued creating abstract art. He says he is rarely commissioned for installations but he does occasionally sell a large public piece. For obvious reasons, smaller fountains are more popular. Regardless, abstract sculpture is now a compulsion and he has since created dozens of immense stone works.
Covered in stone dust as he refines his giant spike with a grinder, he’s content for now assembling these few oversized pieces for Ix. It’s a herculean task, but he’s compelled to continue. “I just keep doing it.”