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It all started approximately 11 years ago when Jeff Powell discovered a stone-carving class at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto and asked his friend, Sue Toorans, to take it with him. Neither of them imagined that when Toorans said "Sure, why not," what a formative moment it would be in both their lives.

Both took to the medium immediately. Powell had taken courses at the art league -- printmaking, drawing, painting -- and was even serving on the board, but had not yet found his niche. "Color," he says, "was not my thing."

Toorans had worked in fabric and metalsmithing, but was attracted by the artistic freedom of stone carving. (Unlike clothing or jewelry, she says, a sculpture "doesn't have to fit on someone's body.")

But shortly before the end of that first semester, just as Powell and Toorans were mastering the basics of their new discipline, the stone-carving instructor suddenly relocated to the East Coast. Even without a replacement teacher, Powell convinced the league to grant Toorans and him continued access to the studio. They worked independently on projects, gleaning new knowledge where they could and honing their skills through a lot of trial and error.

In just a few short years, the stone-carving class was back in the art league's course catalogue, this time with Toorans and Powell as co-instructors.

Now, nearly every Tuesday evening, you will find them in the studio, passing on what they have learned to a small group of students. Class size hovers around 10, with each semester bringing a mix of new faces and returning students.

The studio itself is a long narrow room in a low-roofed building on Alma Street in Palo Alto, not far from downtown. A double row of folding tables runs the length of the room. Shelves and cabinets line the walls. The space does double-duty as a ceramics classroom; it's impossible to guess how much of the fine dust in the room is powdered clay and how much is powdered alabaster.

The atmosphere is casual. Toorans says she and Powell lecture only two or three times during a 12-week course. More often, they simply circulate among the students, answering questions or offering tips as needed. Conversation in the studio is wide-ranging and collegial. Following a volley of jokes during a recent class session, one student quips, "Sometimes we even talk about art."

The free-range chatter points up one of the most significant aspects of stone carving as an art form: It is, in Toorans' words, "a slow medium." Shaping, refining and polishing a hunk of raw stone into a finished sculpture requires, more than anything else, a great deal of patience, and much of the work is tedious (especially the late stages, when the sculpture is sanded with ever-finer grades of sandpaper until it takes on a watery sheen). Twelve consecutive Tuesday evenings, she admits, is barely enough time for a student to finish a small piece with concerted effort. Some of the returning students are working on sculptures that they began more than a year ago.

One such student, Doug Howett, arrives in the studio on a recent evening pulling his roughed-out sculpture in a wagon. Given that his piece -- a figure of a runner that he has been carving out of high-grade white carrera statuaria marble for the past 15 months -- is roughly 18 inches high and composed of stone that weighs 150 pounds per cubic foot, the wagon makes sense.

Howett hoists the sculpture onto the table and lays it on its side, cramming an old Nerf football underneath to hold the piece at the desired angle. He estimates he has another six months of work to do before his vision reaches completion, before that flash of inspiration from early 2008 is finally fulfilled. At present, Howett is working with a variety of curved metal files, smoothing the concavities and starting to add detail, seemingly one molecule at a time. "Marble is so hard ... It's just repeat, repeat, repeat."

Next to him, Carolyn Siegel is nearly finished with the short-beaked, round-bodied bird that she is carving from raspberry alabaster. Siegel has worked in clay for several years and currently teaches sculptural ceramics at a local high school, but she is relatively new to stone carving.

She seems intrigued by the inherent character in a chunk of stone, perhaps because it is so unlike the malleability of clay. As Seigel begins to polish her current sculpture, she makes a happy discovery: a darker stripe in the alabaster -- typically unnoticed until the stone is either polished or wetted -- running down the center of the bird's head and directly down the beak.

Powell and Toorans are both quick to point out that these "surprises" in the stone can just as often be unpleasant. "It's not a medium for perfectionists," Powell explains, "because every stone is going to have unexpected color changes or inclusions (imperfections). You have to make compromises with the stone."

At the far end of the table -- that's the "mineral chips flying through the air" end -- are a number of students who are just beginning to explore the surprises concealed in their blocks of alabaster and soapstone. One is a brand-new student this quarter; the others are returning students who happen to be in the early stages of new projects. All are wielding hammers and chisels.

"These are tools that Michelangelo would recognize," Toorans says, explaining that the process of carving stone has not changed significantly in centuries. Unless you use modern power tools (as Toorans does in her home studio), it's still done with a variety of specialized chisels, files and rasps.

"Chiseling is more fun than sanding," says Lee Nelson, one of the returning students, pausing to run his fingers over the crosshatch pattern left in his block of soapstone by a toothed chisel. "You see more result. You feel more connection to the stone."

"It takes my mind off everything, which is something I didn't expect," he adds, echoing Powell's assertion that "The physical release of picking up a hammer and chisel ... becomes meditative."

A few feet away, Jeremy Shar listens as he chiseled a hunk of stone into the rough outline of what will one day be an octopus. Shar is a Menlo Park high school student who has been coming to this class for more than three years. He holds his own conversationally in a group that includes engineers, a law librarian, a medical researcher, a therapist and an honest-to-gosh rocket scientist. Asked what keeps bringing him back, he replies, "It's kind of fun, doing something that nobody else you know is doing."

The slowly emerging octopus is just one of five projects that Shar is currently working on, so chances are good he'll be coming to the Tuesday-evening studio for some time. And chances are good that Powell and Toorans will be there to share the fruits of their experience.

"Sue and I will keep doing this as long as the Pacific Art League is there and will have us," Powell says. "We both love it so much, I don't see us stopping."


Info: Pacific Art League classes are offered on a quarterly basis. For more information on this and other courses, go to www.pacificartleague.org or call 650-321-3891.