The Story
From Connecticut to Maui. From stone to legend.
A life carved in lava rock, salt air, and story — told in bronze, wood, and paint.
Born to Make Things
Southington, Connecticut was Dale Zarrella’s first landscape: snow on slate roofs, factory whistles in the distance, the patient weight of New England stone. As a boy he pulled apart radios, carved scraps of wood, sketched faces in the margins of his schoolbooks. He wasn’t trying to be an artist. He was simply answering a restlessness in his hands.
For years he worked like this — building, carving, learning the discipline of tools and materials. But his imagination kept drifting toward another horizon: stories of the Pacific, of islands born from fire, of cultures that treated stone and wood as living ancestors. In those stories, something in him recognized home.
In 1985, he stepped onto Maui for the first time and felt the ground answer back. The trade winds, the scent of plumeria, the black line of lava cliffs against a cobalt sea — all of it arrived not as scenery, but as a directive. He moved to the island and never left. The boy who had been born to make things had finally found the place that wanted to be made.
Placeholder image: Moody Hawaiian coastline at dusk, waves breaking against volcanic rock.
Art as Conversation
Dale does not see sculpture and painting as separate disciplines. To him they are different voices in the same ongoing conversation between the islands and the people who move through them. For over four decades, that conversation has flowed into bronze, koa, stone, and canvas — each piece a sentence in a longer story about devotion, memory, and belonging.
Placeholder image: Dramatic studio close-up of bronze details catching warm light.
His works live in museums, resorts, and public spaces around the world, yet they all seem to carry the same low hum of surf and wind. In hotel lobbies, church courtyards, and private collections, his figures stand in quiet conversation with those who pass: saints and ali'i, voyagers and sea turtles, mothers and children locked in a moment of eternal embrace.
Among his most iconic works is his bronze Saint Damien statue, a portrait of the priest who served the people of Moloka'i with fierce, uncompromising compassion. The sculpture carries the weight of sacrifice in the set of the shoulders, the tenderness of service in the open hands. It has become less an artwork than a meeting place for faith and gratitude.
His Honu monuments — sea turtles in bronze and wood — have, over time, grown into symbols of conservation and cultural memory. Children run their hands along the polished shells; elders pause to whisper stories. Each Honu is a reminder that the creatures who share these waters are not ornaments of the scenery but guardians of a lineage that stretches far beyond our own lifetimes.
For years, as Artist-in-Residence at the Fairmont Kea Lani, Dale opened that conversation to guests through his weekly Art, Culture & Chocolate tours. Collectors, families, and first-time visitors walked through the grounds with him, tasting stories of the islands as much as they tasted the chocolate in their hands. Those evenings were less about sales than about initiation — an invitation into the way the islands see themselves.
Placeholder image: Wildfire-scarred wood emerging as a luminous carved figure.
Rising from the Ashes
In August 2023, fire tore through West Maui, leaving behind a silence almost too heavy to describe. Trees that had shaded generations of families were reduced to blackened silhouettes. For months, the smell of smoke clung to the air like a memory that refused to clear.
Dale could not look away. Partnering with Treecovery Hawaii, he began to work with salvaged wood from the burn zones, lifting figures from trunks that seemed, at first glance, beyond saving. Each gouge of the chisel was a negotiation with loss; each emerging face a quiet refusal of despair.
The collection that followed, Spirits of Aloha, is not a memorial. It is a transformation. Charred branches become guardians, twisted roots become dancers, hollowed trunks become vessels of light. Grief is still present in the grain, but it moves now — turning toward beauty, toward legacy, toward the stubborn, glowing ember of hope.
Art in Service of the Living World
For Dale, the Honu are more than a recurring motif; they are a covenant. Over years of walking Maui's beaches at dawn and watching turtles surface in the long, blue light of evening, he has come to see them as elder storytellers of the sea. Their paths trace migrations older than any human map. Their survival is a measure of our own integrity.
His connection to the World Turtle Trust grew from that reverence. Through dedicated works, collaborations, and ongoing support, he has tied his artistic practice to the protection of Hawaii's sea turtles and the ecosystems they depend upon. Each sculpture becomes a kind of ambassador — a physical reminder that what lives beneath the surface of the water needs defenders on the shore.
In this way, Dale's studio is not separate from the reef or the nesting beach. It is another reef, another shoreline, where art is used to extend care, attention, and responsibility to the living world.
Placeholder image: Honu swimming through shafts of light in a deep blue ocean.
“I didn't choose Hawaii. Hawaii chose me. Everything I make comes from that.”
— Dale Zarrella
Ready to experience Dale's world in person?
Walk among the sculptures, breathe the studio air, and stand where the stories begin.
