LACKAWAXEN, PA — Turn off a quiet Lackawaxen back road onto a long driveway, follow it past its attached house through the woods and through a long clearing open to the sky, and the dirt road, worn with bumps and crevices, will bring you, ultimately, to a sole, multifaceted stone sphere.
This unique, lithadelic sculpture was created by Devin Devine, a stonemason and artist who has made a practice of drawing art up from the ground.
Devine has been drawing since he was young. He would draw things “from science fiction and comic books and what not—like planets, Jupiter, and alien planets, as well as our own planet Gaia as seen from outer space, swirling lines of cloud cover, and under that, you have similar lines and formations geologically.”
However, he did not immediately translate that talent into an artistic practice. He started working as a commercial stonemason 29 years ago, building stone walls and the like.
Some time later, “When I started my own business, I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to have more time’” for artistic endeavors, he said. “That’s a joke—any small-business person knows that’s a joke. Before I started, I thought I’m going to have more time to dedicate to my stories and drawings, but instead, eventually, I started doing artistic stuff with my stonework.”
Devine’s artistic practice brings together his skills as a stonemason and his artistic interests into a style defined by swirling, varicolored patterns, a style he calls “lithadelic.” The word is coined from “lithos,” meaning “stone,” and “delic,” meaning “make visible” but, in this case, referring back to “psychedelic.”
The lithadelic spheres are one of his signature types of pieces, with stone stacked on stone to create a shifting orb. Devine also does a variety of other types of stonework, including rustic benches, newly-created “ancient” ruins and cairns.
The making of a stone sphere starts with the gathering of the materials.
In Devine’s more commercial work, he ends up with a lot of scrap stone. These scraps get set aside to be repurposed into artistic creations.
Wherever the stone comes from, Devine pays attention to its origins as he puts it together into the sculpture. He uses a lot of local stone, tieing his sculptures to the geology of the region.
“I can literally point to all these and tell you where they come from,” he said, gesturing at the lithadelic sphere. “The majority of the stone is bluestone from the land and bluestone left over from my job sites, burgundy stone native to me, and yellow stone is from Scranton,” he said. “It’s all local material, pretty much—there are [exceptions]; this is granite countertop, reclaimed bits.”
The stones themselves come together into a sphere with the employment of techniques from Devine’s work as a commercial stone mason. Devine builds dry stone walls—that’s stone walls built by careful tacking, without the use of mortar—and the spheres are built according to the same principles. “Stones go all the way through; it’s not hollow or anything like that,” he said. “It’s built so its own gravity will hold it together.”
Some of those principles have loosened over time. “Once upon a time, I was fairly insistent and dogmatical in that,” he said. “I wanted everybody to understand I could build this without mortar. In order to stay in business, and also for various [other] reasons, I have included mortar in some of them. People are paying good money for this; they want a permanent structure.”
The Lackawaxen sphere is the second he’s built for the same person’s commission, 13 years apart. The first sphere included no mortar; while the commissioner gave him artistic free rein with both, he decided to include mortar in the more recent one because, due to its location, there was more risk that a tree would fall on it and injure it.
“Nowadays, what I’ve done is I insist that everything I build can stand without mortar, even if there’s mortar added,” he said.
Being in the presence of the sphere is an exercise in subtle perception.
Sunlight filters through the forest to fall in patches on the sphere, highlighting the colors of the stonework or plunging them into shadow. The colors of the stonework shift as you make your way around the sculpture: one side is purple with a yellow inlay, another is blue with a purple inlay, a third is olive green with a burgundy inlay. The colors are different, too, in the wet and in the dry, making for a different viewing experience depending on the weather. There are swirling lines and little dots of sparkling stone, distinct from their surroundings, and lines that pull away into the ground, into the earth, grounding the sphere in the land from which came the rocks that give it substance.
It’s a distinctive form of art, and it’s one that Devine makes his own.
“I love it,” he said. “This is what I do. This is what I live for, now.”
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