Stone temples’ pilot: Sculptor Karl Ramberg publishes memoir
Legendary Lawrence rock artist shares his stories at leisurely tempo.
Humble, modest, kind and accomplished are simple words that perhaps begin to offer insight into the Lawrence arts and culture institution named Karl Ramberg—as would knowing he’ll be plenty riled about being described as an institution, cultured or otherwise.
A far better trail leading to the soft- spoken man is his soft-spoken book, Stone Diary: Confessions of a Hard Hewer. Ramberg’s self-published memoir defies expectations that typically surround self-published memoirs. It is gentle, instructive, and thoroughly pleasant company; while the book is the story of his life, Ramberg, ’82, manages to make it about everything but Karl.
He is interested in others: notably the late Elden Tefft, f’49, g’50, and his sublimely talented sister, Laura Ramberg, f’81. Places: “… be sure to look out over the prairie. There is something out there.” Things and ideas: art, stone, mentorship, companionship, community, family, friends.
Ramberg started writing bits of Stone Diary many years and three computers ago, and says typing his Kinko’s manuscript back into his newest digital box proved a worthy exercise. Granted, Ramberg finds most labor and all artistic endeavor to be worthy exercises, but, in this case, it was the numbing chore of typing out a book that had already been typed that somehow caused his mind to wander into the idea of carving his own cover. Which is pretty cool. It’s also pretty Karl.
One disappointment lingers: Our friend chose to publish his book in spring and see it embraced in summer, when it feels more like a winter thing, a work to be consumed slowly, leisurely, beside a fire. Or next to an alert old dog in a trusted old pickup truck out on the frosty old prairie, or among friends in a toasty warm cafe. Can’t explain why, exactly, which is OK. Notions don’t always need solutions.
“To see Buddha sitting on his altar overlooking what is becoming a prairie gives me such delight,” Ramberg writes of the sculpture he carved for the Kansas Zen Center, his first large-scale public project after completing work with his sister on Dyche Hall’s grotesques. “I find myself stopping over there and walking the path and stopping and sitting on one of the sitting stones. Just sitting and breathing it all in. That ain’t meditation, is it? No, that’s just a guy sitting and breathing, right?”
Chris Lazzarino, j’86, is associate editor of Kansas Alumni magazine.
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