Design notebooks remain confidential. But we decided to release ours, since this is what many of our clients are trying to find out: why it looks the way it does? It’s a fair question: after all, each line of a monument is the result of a particular decision, and the angel wings headstone – the heart of angel wings that represents the most popular design among our clients – got a particularly hefty share of them. I’m the one behind this particular design: these are my raw designer’s notes, cleaned up just enough for publication. They are an illustration of what goes into the design of an artistic piece of memorial design.
Sketchbook entry one: initial task
The story began not with a project idea but with a trend in our consultation notes. After months spent talking to bereaved families, there always came this idea: something about being held. A classical guardian angel, standing proudly at the top of a stone, does the work quite well. But what families are asking for is something else. Something that would say: being encircled, protected, embraced. A mother used the term “wrapped up safely”; a widower wanted someone to be “tucked in”. From my note that became the project: the wings families are asking for are not the wings of flying. These are folding wings.
Sketchbook entry two: wings development
Angels of cemeteries have a history of two centuries and their wings are mainly representative: vertical and raised to signify the connection to the higher world. Our task required the very opposite: wings as embrace, curving but not closing off a stone surface completely. The first sketches failed the assignment beautifully: fully enveloping wings left no place outside. A heart in a cage of feathers would mean the opposite of the assignment. The breakthrough came with the idea of restraint: wings rising behind the heart and curling to the front without fully closing the stone’s crest. This is where I spent eleven pages, and I wouldn’t hesitate defending them. Close them by two more inches and they speak of keeping away; open them by two more inches and they become meaningless. The wings’ position speaks about being kept in the safest manner possible, and that was the assignment.
Sketchbook entry three: feather problem
The details of the wings are what will make or break carved monuments: make them too realistic and you end up with taxidermy, make them too stylized and you turn it into an Art Deco. The carving team and I worked out the depth of different parts of a wing in a hierarchy. The wings of our angel have deep, boldly carved primary feathers, throwing a shadow visible to any viewer. The feather textures become lighter and softer towards the wing’s shoulder. In the light of an afternoon day, our wing becomes something landing right now. As our lead stonecarver put it: “These should look like they have just landed a moment before you.”
Sketchbook entry four: why a heart, and why this one
Hearts bring danger in the design of memorials, because it can easily become sentimental to the point of greeting cards. The notebook is truthful in that we have spent weeks tweaking our heart. If it was too puffy it became babyish; too narrow – looked like a spade. Our heart has a bit of puffiness and soft dip, its bulk located at its bottom part. We took it as an inspiration from the classic heart of mourning from the era of Victorian age rather than from valentine heart. It’s a strong heart. There’s room for inscription on it: name and the dates are engraved right in front of the framing wings, with some space left below, where the family’s inscription may be put. The inscriptions chosen for this heart monument prove the assignment, almost with an eerie consistency: “Safe in his arms”, “held forever”, “wrapped in love”. This monument was reverse engineered to suit those phrases before a single word got engraved on it.
Sketchbook entry five: material specifics
This heart can be purchased in various types of granite that we offer in our catalog, but the notebook should mention its favorite: deep gray and black polished granite makes shadow effects of wings look their best and etching detail like portrait on it and small flowers at its base become clearly readable. Also the polishing solves a design task for us. This monument gets touched more often than anything in our catalog. Installers reported it, families – reported it, too: the wings’ shape leaves at hand height a perfect place for a hand resting there in the manner you’d rest your hand on the shoulder. And forty years of polishing the granite by such hands require only an occasional rinsing. We didn’t think of this hand-rest, but the geometry made it appear, and now I’ve stopped pretending that the most beautiful features of a design are its intentional ones.
Sketchbook entry six: whom this monument is designed for
The families that chose a design come with time, and our client families haven’t left us in surprise: the angel wings heart monument became the choice of people, who require the maximum gentleness. It became most often the memorial for the hardest losses, namely the losses of children and younger people, mothers and beloved members of a family whose stones get chosen by committee of the grieving people. This heart monument works for single inscriptions and for companion ones, fits both memorial park formats and large upright monuments (we verify our stone size against cemetery rules concerning dimensions and sculptures before manufacturing: wings profile is triggering cemetery regulation more often than families expect, and the verification call is ours to make, not yours). And it became a source of the cards stored in a special drawer in our studio: these are the thank you cards mentioning one detail more than any other: the wings. Like they’re holding her. Brief returned to sender.
Final entry
There’s an image of memorial design as somber work. Our design notebook should clarify the record for our way out: this was the liveliest project I’ve worked with in my career: the entire task was to translate the love between people into the shape that will preserve it for centuries. The angel wings heart was an answer: being held, not being kept; sheltered, not sealed; landed just a moment ago. You can see this monument in our catalog on memoryheadstones.com with various granite options and size possibilities as well as with the design procedure (proofs and revisions and cemetery coordination) for tuning it for your family’s inscription. And if you will visit one of such monuments someday in a cemetery, you’ll know why the wings don’t fully touch at their top.
Two inches of open sky. Eleven pages. Worth every single one of them.
