Florin Stejac

Although our focus this year – the first season of conservation – was the 9 concrete sculptures and not the other 7 marble ones, we took advantage of a marvelous unexpected opportunity!

Florin Stejac is a renowned stone sculpture conservator from Romania, and he happened to be the visiting summer resident of the Salem Art Works in Upstate New York. So we snatched him away and along with sculptor Peter Lundberg, cleaned and repaired our most treasured SOTH sculpture, ‘Stones for Meditation’ by Karl Prantl, the founder of the International Sculpture Symposium movement.

This was a challenging restoration. Not only was the marble heavily soiled by decades of mold and dirt, but worst of all, incised graffiti was so deep it had to be filled with epoxy. Then the epoxy had to be pigmented to precisely match the marble.

After they finished, a cover was erected to preserve the cleaning and repair until the sculpture is moved. The current location is a closed rest area so it is planned to be moved next year to an active one on I-89 southbound in Randolph.

Then the best surprise of all! Karl Prantl’s daughter Katharina Prantl, visited from her home in Austria to inspect the amazing work by Peter and Florin.