Rising Stars: Meet Mark Carroll of Cave Creek

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Carroll.

Hi Mark, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Mark Carroll has been a professional sculptor and in business as The Sculpture Studio since 1985. After teaching high school art for eight years, he left to make a career as a sculptor and established his own studio. From his start carving wildlife woodcarvings, his career has evolved into creating large sculptures for corporate office buildings, churches, and hospitals. He has sculptures in private collections across the country.
Mark was born in Buffalo, NY, in 1950 and grew up in a home filled with artistic activity. His father, Richard, a full-time sculptor and master carver in wood and stone, created granite monuments and religious figures for churches. His mother, Mary, a landscape and portrait painter, worked primarily in oils.
He attended East Aurora High School, East Aurora, NY, majoring in Art. In 1973, he received a Bachelors Degree in Liberal Arts, Art, from Buffalo State College, and in 1979, completed the NYS Teaching Certification K-12. He was awarded a Master’s Degree in Art Education in 1985. Mark taught high school art at East Aurora High School, Iroquois High School in Elma, NY, and Lafayette High School in Syracuse, NY.
Starting his career as a woodcarver, Mark began by carving small caricature figures and duck decoys, then progressed to extremely detailed decorative bird carvings. After his father died, Mark was asked if he could fill in and carve a statue for a local church. The success of that sculpture soon led to commissions to carve figures for numerous other local churches and hospitals. For several years he worked full-time sculpting life-size figures in wood.
The experiences that most profoundly influenced his philosophy of life and approach to art were two long-distance hikes on the Appalachian Trail. In 1977 and again in 1986, he walked the entire wilderness trail from Georgia to Maine, a distance of 2,145 miles. The intense experience of walking and living in the natural beauty of forests and mountains for five months at a time left a deep impression.
His interest in nature led to commissions to carve scientifically accurate reproductions for the Buffalo Museum of Science in Buffalo NY. The most interesting project was carving an Archaeopteryx, the first bird, with its wings extended in flight. Measurements for the carving were made by working from a plaster cast of the fossil remains. Next, he carved a 32X enlargement of a Western Conifer Seed Bug for the entomology department. This time he made detailed drawings of the insect by observing it under a microscope. The project that was the most fun was carving a baby Wooly Mammoth from a large cherry log. It was placed in the Discovery Room of the museum for children to climb.

After taking a marble carving class at the Carving Studio in W. Rutland, Vermont, stone carving became a new fascination. From marble, he went on to learn how to split, carve, and polish granite. For twelve years, Mark attended the Limestone Sculpture Symposium in Bloomington IN. Participants were given a 1,200 pound block of limestone to carve during the week-long symposium.
A desire to combine different materials prompted an interest in welding. Combinations of limestone and steel, or granite and stainless steel, were soon added to his portfolio of work.
For 23 years, Mark worked as a free-lance model maker for the toy industry, especially for Fisher Price. Mark would be given a drawing of a figure, animal, or other toy part, and he then sculpted the model-master in clay or wax that was used to make the final injection molds for production.
Mark relocated his studio from East Aurora NY to Cave Creek, Arizona in January of 2009.
In 2014, Mark won a nationwide competition to create two monuments for the entryways to the Town of Cave Creek. Mark fabricated two nine foot tall stainless steel horses, which were mounted on four foot tall steel and stone bases, making each monument size thirteen feet tall.
From his studio in Cave Creek, Mark has fabricated large public art sculptures for towns in Arizona, like Scottsdale, Avondale, and Sunnyslope. He continued to carve life-size wood figures for churches in Elma NY, Austin TX, and Chandler AZ. Always creating his own sculptures, Mark exhibits them in art shows and art galleries.
The early experience of making a wide variety of complex, detailed wildlife and figure carvings, then later the discipline of exacting, industrial model-making honed his craftsmanship and eye for detail. This training provided the necessary technical expertise when he turned to developing a vocabulary of personal artistic form in wood, stone, and metal.
Evolving from the realistic to the abstract, his sculpture, inspired by the human figure and the organic shapes of nature, makes an uplifting affirmation of the human spirit.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Building up a large enough clientele to make a yearly salary.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I have been successful by being able to work in many materials and styles. I started as a woodcarver and did a lot of that. I then got into stone carving and did a lot of that. Finally, I learned to weld and have now done a lot of that. So whatever a client might want I can probably do it.
I began working in a very realistic style and gradually became more interested in contemporary or modern art. But I can still go back and carve a realistic figure in stone or wood.
Some sculptures are just to make money. I’m proud of the sculptures that express my unique vision.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Both my parents were artists and had their artist friends around, so I grew up surrounded by an art environment. My father worked in the stone mills carving granite. I thought that is a hard way to make a living, so I was more interested in photography. I was doing wood carving also at the time, and when he passed, he left me his stone carving tools.
I didn’t know how to use them, so I had to take lessons at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center in W. Rutland VT.
I soon fell in love with carving stone.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thesculpturestudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/azsculptor/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-carroll-3b493021/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AZsculptor09

Image Credits
All the photos are taken by me.