Some artists wait their whole lives to have work shown in a gallery. Greg Guise told a little white lie 15 years ago that gave him entrance to exhibition space open for all eternity.
“My gallery just happens to be outdoors, and it will be there forever,” says Guise, a 44-year-old gravestone carver from Kansas. “I kind of giggle at people who are afraid to go into a cemetery. I stop at every cemetery I see. To me, it’s an art gallery outdoors.”
Guise coaxes intricate portraits and landscapes from polished blocks of jet-black granite mined in Africa and India, using careful strokes of an etching tool to sum up long lives and those cut short.
His work plays to “a fundamental human need to remember and to be remembered,” funeral director John Horan says.
After decades of modest headstones placed by Depression- and World War II- era survivors who felt that much more than a name, date and maybe a cross or wedding rings was garish, baby boomers have revived more effusive ways to memorialize their friends and families, Horan says.
“It’s now OK to unabashedly tell someone’s story.”
But carvers still doing this detailed memorial work are rare.
“Scanners and lasers are accomplishing the vast majority of personalization on memorials,” says Horan, president of Horan & McConaty funeral service in Aurora. “There are very few craftsmen like this left, who are able to interpret a life with hammer and chisel.”
In Guise’s case, the implement is a Dremel tool fitted with a diamond bit. He uses it to delicately pick out the important parts of a person’s life, speck by speck. In a spartan office at the front of the giant Kansas Granite Industries manufacturing plant in Ellis, Kan., he works under a bright carpenter’s lamp, rock tunes pouring from a portable radio.
He moves deliberately, working from drawings hand sketched on tracing paper.
“There ain’t no mistaking, you can’t goof,” Guise says. His technique is similar to that used by tattoo artists working designs on the human body. “I use the same tool to work on auto glass, and used to go to a lot of hot-rod shows. People would say, ‘Oh my God, do you do tattoos?’ I’ve never had the guts to take on someone’s skin.”
He did have the courage to tell a little fib when his boss at another monument company asked if he knew how to etch. He had been relying on a computer to create rubber stencils used to sandblast names, dates and low-relief decorations on headstones.
When an order for etching came in, Guise claimed he knew how to do it. “I lied and said ‘Sure!’ It’s the only way you get to do stuff,” he says. “I used a simple little etching tool, like a fat pencil that goes in and out like a tattoo gun.”
Talent showed early
Guise sold his first painting when he was a 15-year-old high school student in Salina, Kan. “My mom said I drew on my crib. I’ve always done art, but I never found exactly what I loved to do. That first etching, I found what I was looking for.”
Now he carves as many as 100 stones a year. They stand in cemeteries in 30 states, including burial grounds in Limon, Flagler and Simla. He does some auto glass work and custom decorative arts, and occasionally works on big public memorials, too.
He is typically called on by ordinary people who want something more extraordinary than names and dates on their headstones. A stone in the Simla cemetery features cattle gathered around a stock tank. Another in Limon portrays a beloved, streamside family cabin with a group of elk standing on the opposite bank.
In the century-old Flagler cemetery, Guise’s work stands out against more rustic stones that are carved with things like ranch brands, tractors, windmills and favorite herding dogs. Cemetery sexton Keith Einspahr, whose parents’ graves are marked by a stone carved with a horse and buggy and a quilter’s needle and spool, marvels at many of the monuments he has watched over for 23 years. “But those black ones, that’s something else, all the detail they have on those.”
One honors Kevin Burns, a standout at Flagler High, who was killed just before he was to enter the Air Force Academy. His stone features the image of wolves taken from the boy’s well-worn T-shirt and jet soaring in the clouds. It is one of Guise’s favorites.
“There are a million roses and a million crosses out in cemeteries,” Guise says. “When they want to get more personal than just a rose, that’s where I come in.”
Emblems of a life
When Terri and Ruben Campbell went to Love Funeral Home in Limon to select a memorial for their 19-year-old son Carl, who died in a car accident in Mexico in April, they picked the symbols they thought would best sum up his short life.
Carl’s photo was laser carved into a stone, and then the piece was sent to Ellis, where Guise etched in the boy’s football helmet and the Limon football field with a sunrise just beyond the goal posts. The back of the stone bears Carl’s signature, collected from the back of a senior photo he had given to a friend, and a grouping of dolphins, which he learned to love during a trip to Alabama two summers ago.
“In a town like this, he kind of belonged to everybody. People in Limon were so generous to us, this memorial was a way for us to show our thanks, and for his classmates, a way to help them, too,” Terri Campbell says. “It’s going to be there forever for him.”
A portrait is perhaps the most personal way to memorialize a loved one. Guise will do them, though it makes him nervous.
“Even if I do an excellent job, and it looks exactly like the photo, if I didn’t see the person smile every day for 30 years, I probably didn’t see the little nuances in the photograph,” Guise says.
“It’s really hard. There is no eraser. Every dot I put down is there for good.”
This story has been corrected in this online archive. In print, due to a reporting error, it gave an incorrect name of a young man from Flagler who was killed just before he was to enter the Air Force Academy. His name was Kevin Burns.
