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Writer's picturePeggy O'Donnell

Simon Verity Water and Earth





One of the world's leading stone artists, Simon Verity, born on July 1, 1945, in Amersham, NW of London, recently passed away. He worked with many materials. For a mosaic of New York City, the following: 

This called for thousands of tesserae, or tiny squarish bits of Murano glass and 40-50 sorts of stone. He included, too, chunks of burned bricks, pieces of kerbstones and fragments of a plate-glass door; anything that crossed his path. His grottoes needed not only shells by the cartload (cowries and abalones were his favourites), but coral, minerals, ferns, antlers, pieces of mirror and clear crystal. His aim was to create a world of rocks in combination with flowing water. (The Economist obituary-9-4-24)

To draw out the biblical figures for the portal at St. John the Divine in New York from Indiana limestone, he used a hammer, mallet and chisel. He worked directly with the stone, without a clay model, letting the stones speak to him. His work was at times whimsical. He also created and restored centuries old grottoes. One of his quotes about his work was this: 

I think there is an eternal fascination in the combination of rocks and water and what you can do with them that bubbles up after a few generations or so. It's a sort of zeitgeist, a spirit of things coming together. 

Guardian in the Chicago Botanical Gardens



His chart is a combination of earth and water. He was a Cancer, with Moon in Pisces. Artists charts are often strong in water signs.  Important for a stone carver is earth, and he had Mars and Venus in Taurus, trine to Jupiter in Virgo. His Sun is  conjunct Saturn in Cancer-he followed the family tradition of generations of artists. It was his five year apprenticeship with this great uncle, Oliver Hill, an artist and a decorator in the Cotswolds that set him on his path. It was there that he learned lettering and printing as well. Very much a Cancerian, his children worked with him, starting at an early age. Also as a Cancer he honored history:

Whenever he started a cathedral job, making that first chip, he thought of the builders who had preceded him. Those masons had understood the cosmos as sacred geometry, and that was his conviction also. (obituary in The Economist, 9-4-24)

Note also his Sun square Neptune, another sign of an artist, they can be divinely inspired. He looked like an inspiration himself, with a head of curly hair covered with stone dust. Sort of a pixieish angel. Although I don't have a birth time, and the chart below is cast for noon, I suspect he did have a strong Uranus. He was one of a kind. 



                                                     Victoria and Albert Museum





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