Roger McFarlane chiselled his path to success as a sculptor

The book, Roger McFarlane Sculptor; Travels - Trevails and Stone Dust, is a significant tome. The large square format book runs to 384 pages and weighs three kilos. It contains a lengthy biography of McFarlane's life journey, and a section on his career as a sculptor, and a section with photography and descriptions of every sculpture he has made, both for private collections and public commissions.

The biography is a very personal account of McFarlane's life and family, full of anecdotes and written in plain language.

From finding various jobs before going to sea at age 16, and coming back and forging an unlikely path that ended up in partnership with his brother Jim creating an extremely successful business, Macquarie Manufacturing, servicing the industrial and mining sectors.

McFarlane is a born storyteller.

For instance, McFarlane, now 76, and his wife, Sandra, were both born at Western Suburbs Hospital in Wallsend. They've been married for 55 years.

"We were both born in Newcastle in same hospital, in same ward," McFarlane says. "The old Western Suburbs Hospital in Wallsend. She is six hours older than me. She was born on the 10th [of February] and I was born on the 11th. We met each other on my 18th birthday at the Palais..."

The section on sculpture is also in plain language, but is a very detailed account of McFarlane's many experiences in educating and immersing himself in public programs about sculpture.

McFarlane's sculpture technique was heavily influenced by the training he undertook (at his own expense) at Pietrasanta in Italy, a Tuscan village most famous as the source of Michelangelo's supply of marble (Carrara marble).

"Pietrasanta is a sculptors' town, lots of tools, supplies, lots of artigianos [stone carvers] working there, they do a long apprenticeship - it takes six years," McFarlane says.

"The late '90s was the last time I was there. Once I got going, I didn't need to go back. I'd love to go back. I need a good reason to go back."

Although he never pursued art in his youth, it had been on his mind since he was a child.

"My ideas were always artistic," McFarlane says. "I always wanted to be a sculptor since I was a kid in short pants.

"In the book, I sort of go through that. I went to Teralba primary school. I read all the books in the school library - there were only about two bookcases of books and they were old books. And they used to have mobile library, the bookmobile, so I used to get books from there, read all the kids section, and then I got my mother's library card and started working through the adult section, this is still at primary school

"But the books I found there that I really liked were on archaeology, that's where they were digging all the old Greek and Roman, all those sort sculptures from civilisations long gone, Babylonian stuff, and it always fascinated me that art outlived society.

"It was immortality in my mind. So I always wanted to carve stone, but it wasn't until 1989, in my 40s that the opportunity came along."

While his first classes in sculpture involved working with soapstone under sculptor Derek Morgan, stone was always his calling.

He has done pieces with Carrara marble (Italy), Chillagoe marble (Queensland) and Peony marble (China). His most familiar public work in Newcastle, Resilience, at Foreshore Park, was made with Thassos marble from Greece.

He also works with bronze and granite.

Again, in the classic sense, he's sculpted several nude pieces.

"The nude is always difficult, to try and make it original because the nude has been done so many times, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands have been produced," McFarlane says. "To make one that looks original, or something about it makes you stop and look at it, it's very difficult."

McFarlane would work from his own life drawing artworks when creating a nude, or a live model, making a body cast of the female before casting it in bronze.

McFarlane has always loved to travel, well before sculpture became part of his life. But his sculpture projects have taken him all over the world, too, including South Korea, Switzerland, Brazil and China.

The public projects come with a list of to-dos, like working with the public, working with the staff you are given, and a firm deadline.

"It's highly intensive. You have a deadline," he says. "But you're working with sculptors from all over the world and you end up making some really good friends there, and sometimes you bump into them in other parts of the world.

"It's a band of sculptors from around the world who get to know each other."