Raymond Coins was born in 1904 in Stuart, Virginia and moved to North Carolina at the age of seven. Coins dropped out of school by the seventh grade to work on the family farm. He continued to work in farming and the tobacco industry until his retirement in 1976, when he began carving stone into arrowheads and ax heads. These small carvings soon led to a hobby of making figures of animals, people, and religious imagery in stone and wood. Coins’ sculptures strongly resemble primitive tribal carvings, although his inspiration comes from the material itself.

He has said: “It comes in my mind what to make. I’ll roll the rock around and see what it makes. It pops in mind. It’s a mystery to me. I am amazed by it.” The sculpture titled “Angel” is a figure Coins frequently depicted in his work - an example of the heavenly bodies that exist in the stone and trees as revealed through Coins’ carvings.