The block weighed 209 pounds and gave nothing away. Standing in front of it, BM Sculptures creator Kenny faced a problem most craftspeople never encounter: this was only his second time carving marble, and one wrong chisel strike on black stone can scar the finished piece permanently. The stakes are different from wood, where a chainsaw can remove in under a minute what marble demands two hours of grinding to clear. What emerged from that block over the following two weeks is a sitting cat named Obsidian, carved from Leon black marble sourced from Leon, Mexico, and sanded by hand through every grit from 40 all the way to 5,000 before polishing.
Why the white vein changed everything
Kenny originally planned a raven. He shelved the idea because he could not solve the structural problem of supporting a bird’s weight on its thin legs in stone. He opened the decision to his audience and one suggestion won immediately: a cat. The reason was the marble itself. A dramatic white vein cuts through the black stone at an unusual angle, and a cat’s face gave that vein a natural home, running straight down the animal’s face like a blaze. He was also thinking about waste. An orca, for example, would have left most of the block unused. The cat filled the stone efficiently, and that proportion decision is, as Kenny put it, ‘a huge part of the decision-making process when considering different animals to carve.’
The black marble introduced a risk the white marble he had worked with before never did. Black stone chips more aggressively, and as Kenny noted, it behaves exactly like a black car: every scuff, every missed grit, every sanding shortcut shows. He sanded over thirteen tools’ worth of work, every square inch, through every single grit level, because a single skipped patch would stand out immediately on the finished surface.
The problems that nearly stopped it
Two crises interrupted the build. First, the space between the cat’s front and back legs was too tight for any of his existing stone-carving bits. He spent a night searching the internet and finally found a long masonry bit that could reach the gap. Second, carving too deep on both sides caused small chips to break free. His fix was unconventional: he mixed marble dust with five-minute epoxy, packed the damaged areas, and let it cure. After grinding, it blended well enough that he called it a win, though he acknowledged he would not know for certain until polishing was complete.
The eyes presented a third obstacle. Kenny ground them out entirely after deciding they were not right, a recurring weak point he named honestly: ‘I just cannot conceptualize how these things are supposed to be.’ The eyeless result, a smooth and slightly abstract feline face, turned out to be the version he preferred.
The name the audience chose
Kenny ran a naming poll on Instagram mid-build, posting a sneak peek before the sculpture was finished. The name Oreo led for a while, a reasonable nod to the white streak down the face. Obsidian won. The finished sculpture weighed 55.1 pounds, starting from 209, and was listed for sale at bmsculptures.com on completion.
The scale in the kitchen doorway
The postal scale Kenny carried out to weigh the finished cat sat on the floor with the cat balanced on top of it, the readout showing 55.1 in plain numerals.
A 209-pound block of black marble from Leon, Mexico gave up 154 pounds of dust and chips over two weeks, thirteen tools, a patched chip, and a set of ground-out eyes, and what remained weighed 55.1 pounds and sat still enough to look like it had been waiting inside the stone the whole time.
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