Eurotunnel and the waters of forgetfulness

The title refers to a book by Yorick Blumenfeld.  I especially like the bit about underground ancestral scams.

Reluctantly I leave Pietrasanta and Studio Sem and drive home.

I stop for the night near Milan with my friends Alessandro and Gaia.  They pity my language skills and dress my toe.  I set off in the snow.

Rain everywhere and the car is burning oil. The Swiss border guard looks like a cross between Raquel Welch and Michael Schumacher and wants 35 Euros to use the roads.  When I finally agree to pay, a more benign guard appears to take the cash.  Raquel is just there to intimidate.

The route turns westerly towards France and I consider heading further up through Switzerland to get the most out of my 35 Euros. But not for long. The only map I have is the sat nav.  So, after stocking up on chocolate, I head into France.

Think about doing the trip in one day, but it is raining again - heavier now, as though it means it. So I slow to a crawl and watch the eta on the sat nav crank up the minutes. Then an hour.

I stop in Laon and guided by my wife on the phone and online, head for the Hotel des Arts.  Well there is a misnomer if ever there was one. Hotel des Burgers and Frites might have been more apt.  But it is clean and the proprietor congratulates me on my French which makes me like him instantly.

Downtown Laon looks like a pit;

but, like Peterborough, there is a cathedral.

I head up there and find the tiny streets cloaked in the mist left by the rain. 

 Damp air soaks up the light from the kettledrum floods that circle the cathedral.  Apart from the obligatory small dog and lady, there is only one other person around.  An amateur photographer with five lenses and a tripod.  My phone camera looks ludicrous.  But the lo-fi look in these captures the mood perfectly.

I eat in the cool and empty pizza restaurant...the one right next door to the fully booked family bistro.  Vive la France.

As it turned out, I slept particularly well at Chez Burger.

I set off for the channel tunnel up through the flat lands made famous by World War I.  There is little in this landscape to distract you from thoughts of those poor buggers shovelled, by the thousand, into sprays of machine gun fire.  I tootle along counting my blessings at never having been to war.

If you haven't driven under the channel you have to give it a try.  After the considerate and not at all vulgar funneling through duty free, the adventure begins.  You drive into one end of a long railway train and carry on through until parked by a steward.  Once stationary, each four cars or so are separated into carriages by automatic doors.  All manoeuvres are directed by ladies in giant reflective jackets. You then slither under the sea for 30 minutes, emerge on the other side and, once the doors slide back, drive off.  Magic.  However, I have half an hour to ask myself ..why are the stewards all female and is there some mystical parity between them and the 'come hither'maidens at Staglieno?  And how would I do it differently if I were running this?  

Well in the first place,I would dress the stewards in togas and rags and have them beckon rather than direct passengers into the carriages.  Inside the train, I would replace all signage and windows with images and memorabilia of French and British ancestors.  No one in particular.  

Flexiplus is Chunnel business class and, apart from the temporary boost to self-esteem, it confers certain privileges: flexible turning-up times, a parking spot at duty free and a special, slightly wider, lane for boarding. In the new world, Flexiplus passengers might expect to have their own ancestors displayed in the carriages. 

And then the train arrives in the UK.  I break open a bar of  the Swiss chocolate for comfort.  It is still sticky from being too close to the heater on the drive up.  The cars in front of me suddenly move.  As I hurry to start up and jerk forward, a square of chocolate falls into the footwell...moving gingerly, I feel around for it, fish it out and, as the car emerges into the light, see that it is caked in marble dust.

Nuns and conjugation

One of the highlights of my time here is the twice-weekly Italian class I have been attending at The Croce Verde.  The class is aimed at visiting workers and so many of the pupils have been and gone.  We have had kind and hilarious Senegalese, warmth from the Cote d'Ivoire, French, Mexicans, an Ecuadorian nun named Carmen (could not help but picture her conjugating with a rose between her teeth), a fluent Italian speaker (?)  from Libya , glamorous Dutch and even someone from the North of England.

My enduring loves are a clutch of Romanian girls who took me under their collective wing and marvelled at my inability to grasp even the simplest of phrases. One of them has a market stall and if trade was slow on the day of the class we would each get a chicken.

This is our farewell Christmas lesson..

A big thank you to our instructor,Theresa, for being so patient with me.

Walt Whitman

In a house in the hills by Montegiori, some local people gather every Thursday night to eat, drink, chat and perform something.  The house belongs to Mariano (arrowed by boat in picture) and he and his friends made me feel very welcome....in effect, I wandered in off the road and sat down.  Such is the hospitality around here.  For me it was a great opportunity to meet people outside the sculpture circle and to practice my fledgling Italian.

Here is the great Oswaldo in full swing...

...and the not quite as great Mark reading Walt Whitman's Facing West from California's Shores in Italian and English

Facing west from California's shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,
the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,
Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)

Thank you Mariano and Oswaldo, and all your friends.

Peralta

Post dated: 15th December 2012

Neil and Kathy Ferber kindly introduced me to Dinah Voisin (pictured) who owns and runs Peralta.

Peralta is a hamlet in Tuscany that was bought and restored in the 1960s by famed hermaphrodite sculptor Fiore de Henriquez...that's her in the photograph behind us.

Here is the view from one of the terraces at Peralta...

...it is a breathtaking place.  Fiore's studio is still intact and there are buildings dotted around the main house. It is truly idyllic.  In October 2013, I will be teaching portrait sculpture here...see

www.portraitsculptureatperalta.com

Neil Ferber has a studio in the complex full of his compelling forms.  Although he acknowledges a debt to Chillida, Neil's work has its own language which seems very personal.  

Thank you Dinah for your hospitality and enthusiasm

Tara tour and coffin candy

Post dated: 9th December 2012

If you want to know, ask Tara.  Tara knows.

I have two weeks to go and feel that I have not seen enough treasures.  So I ask French Reunion artist Tara from Studio Sem where to find something unusual.  Before I know it, I am being whisked off to Lucca which is about 25 minutes from Pietrasanta.  Tara is not one to hang about. I did not even have time to get the camera so if the following pictures do not look as if they were taken on an ipad, then I have lifted them from the web.

In order she shows me:

The stunning Duomo di San Martino..

..and, inside, the fabulous Volto Santo (Holy Face)..pictured here robed for the festival

The story has it that "the large wooden crucifix is said to have been carved by Nicodemus, the biblical figure who helped Joseph of Arimathea remove Christ's body from the cross in John 19.

According to mediaeval legend, Nicodemus did all the carving work except the face, which he hesitated to complete for fear of not doing it justice.  He fell asleep, and upon waking, found the face beautifully carved - the miraculous work of an angel.  The Crucifix of the Holy Face was buried in a cave for safekeeping, where it remained for centuries.

It was rediscovered by Bishop Gualfredo, who was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when its location was revealed to him in a dream. To allow God to decide where the Crucifix should be kept, the bishop set it adrift on an unmanned boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The Volto Santo arrived on the shores of northern Italy, where the Bishop of Lucca, also prompted by a dream, put it into a wagon with no driver to determine its final location.

 The two oxen pulling the wagon stopped of their own accord at Lucca in 782.

The Volto Santo was placed in the Church of San Frediano, but the next morning, it was found to have been miraculously transferred to San Martino. For this reason, the legend explains, San Martino was designated the cathedral of Lucca (an honour previously held by Santi Giovanni e Reparata)."

(The only credible part of this story is, to me, the bit about going to sleep and finding the work finished in the morning;) 

It is also known as the black Christ. The work is probably a copy from a Syrian effigy, hence the dark wood and Levantine complexion. 

As Christianity expanded into Europe, depicting him as a local made a lot of sense...he would be easier to relate to and so the message would be all the simpler to deliver.  Christ became pinky-beige.

As a piece of sculpture, Volto Santo is arresting.  It is a beautiful blend of naturalism and stylised form.  The geometric sweeps of drapery suggest Byzantine sculpture.

As if that were not enough...just around the corner is one of the best coffin sculptures I have ever seen.  It dates around 1407, is by Jacopo della Quercia, is in marble and is of Ilaria del Carretto

Regardless of when it was made, a major part of what makes sculpture work is its abstract qualities; the volumes beneath the detail..the emotional core at the heart of form.

In the detail pictured below there are flourishes, tassels and hair; but take those away and you are left with a pile of perfectly balanced forms. 

Her head is placed so as to make an offering of her face (she was a renowned beauty and it was wished to preserve the memory of that in the commission).  The simplified form of the neck and shoulders enhance the presentation of the face.

On a more prosaic level, this also shows how important it is to choose your marble carefully...the only deterioration on the sculpture is where her nose has been chipped.

I want to expand the underlying abstract form matter for a minute with some examples.  Take two well-known sculptures in the figurative tradition....Michelangelo's young slave

and Rodin's The Thinker

To me, Michelangelo's work exudes grandeur, beauty and a profound sense of self.  He invented anatomical forms on the body to enhance expression, but they came from within..as if the surface landscape of the muscles and bones was born deep within the person. 

 Rodin's The Thinker is, by comparison, superficial and crude.  The muscles and bone exaggerations look as if they have been applied as mosaic.  It is histrionic nonsense: an over-egged pudding of a sculpture.

Rodin was one of the greatest life modellers and portrait sculptors of the 19th century...probably of all time...but he lost the plot when he started trying to make his work more interesting by playing with the surfaces.  The Burghers of Calais had far more to them before he draped them with plaster impregnated blankets for example.  Once he had seen Michelangelo's slaves, he was understandably entranced and proceeded to give the public his own watered down versions.

My final stop on the tour of Lucca was the Filippo Lippi in San Michele in Foro

This is just hanging on the wall and is still used as an object of prayer.  It depicts the Saints Helen, Jerome, Sebastian and Roch and was painted in 1483.

Unrelated to the beautiful colours in this picture, a story goes that while working for Massacio, Lippi snaffled some pigment to use for a painting he was doing on the wall of a brothel in Florence.  Colours were precious and closely guarded, and artists had their own blends.  Some months later, Massacio nipped into the brothel for some afternoon tea, looked up and exlcaimed, "Hang on, that's my red!"

Thank you, Tara, for a wonderful day in Lucca.

  

'I don't remember eating that...'

Best not to comment on other sculptors' work.

For a number of reasons.

• You never know the circumstances under which a work has been made or the pressures of the commission.  (I have made some absolute howlers when compelled to complete under duress and would certainly not wish to be judged on those alone).
• You never know; you may, one day, meet the sculptor over dinner or with a big hammer in her hand.
• Sometimes people just have a bad day, or week, or year or decade and that is fine and needs to be tolerated because the path to a oneness with creative output is different for everyone.

And who is to judge?  Encouraged by our impartial and thought-provoking media, we all love to be outraged by art.  Goodness knows why.  Artists are rarely malevolent and even those who are driven by diabolic intent are fairly harmless in the wider scheme of things.  Most artists I know just want to do their thing, give that thing to the world and, with any luck, get paid something in return so that they can carry on doing their thing.  And they want to be loved.

Perhaps we get outraged by art because we simply cannot get our heads around the things we are impotent to affect.  Things like wars, traffic jams, and the terrifying level of consumption and pollution in developed countries.  And, on a personal note, the blatant disregard for the English language on supermarket signage:  "10 items or less" springs to mind. To think that children may every once in a while glance up from the cake-trough and see such a sign.  Just as well that the effects of the cuts might mean that fewer and fewer of them will be able to read.

That said....

...some will be able to pass this shining example of mythologocial/classical/sexually charged/onanistic symbolism on their way to and from school each day.

For the record, I am not at all outraged by this...merely very amused for, probably, all the wrong reasons.

I could not find a title or attribution of any kind on the sculpture or plinth.  It does look as if it may have been conceived out of a game of sculpture Consequences, so perhaps there was more than one perpetrator.

I felt at liberty to come up with my own title (see title) and wonder whether you can too...suggestions in the comment box please and don't forget to keep it clean....children may be reading this.

Quarries and Mick Jagger

Post dated week 3rd December 2012

This was a week marked by quarry visits in the Alpi Apuane

Keara McMartin, co-director at Studio Sem, has been for some weeks in the exacting and laborious process of sourcing a particular block of marble for the German sculptor Dirk Wilhelm (pictured below).

 The sculpture will be a large piece for a public area and, as it is going to be worked, cut into sections and re-aligned, it must be made from one block so that the grain and veining are consistent in the final work.

The November floods had made transporting blocks from the mountains down to Carrara and on very nearly impossible.  And the main business of the quarries, selling blocks for cladding, flooring etc to the construction industry, meant that orders were backing up.  Marble for sculpture is only one part of the quarry's income so  it is, understandably, somewhere on a list of priorities rather than, as we would all like to think, at the top. 

As the roads are cleared and the cavatori (quarry workers) get back to work, Dirk is doing what sculptors do when they might otherwise be kicking their heels...making something else.

Into all this step Keara

She has to ensure that Dirk gets the perfect block and is realistic about what the quarry, given the pressures, can provide, and when.  She also has to get a guarantee from the quarry that, should the block be faulty, they will replace it.  I start to realise just how key Keara is to all this...the behind the scenes stuff.... and so when she asked whether I would like to accompany her and Dirk on a visit to Franco Petacchi's quarry for a marble inspection, I jumped at the chance.

Franco Petacchi features earlier in the blog, or at least his studio does (he has both studio and quarry just up from Carrara).  Ekkehard Altenburger carved his House of the Gordian Knot there....and Ekkehard was full of praise for how much care Franco had taken in selecting his block.  

Keara and Franco

Cavatori are notoriously tough people.  The work has mostly been in families for generations and they are fiercely independent.  Franco is wearing dark glasses because a steel pressure cushion (used as support spacers while extracting the blocks from the hill) burst in his face a few weeks ago.

Although I had intended this photograph to be an admittedly rather cruel contemporary pop portrait of Mick Jagger, it is one of the discarded cushions....it is made of sheet steel so you can imagine the kind of pressure needed to inflate it...and the kind of damage it might do if it explodes.  

So faced with a partially cut out mountain like this

(one day all this will be bathrooms)

how do you get at the blocks?

Well this is how.

You chainsaw in parallel to the floor at about skirting board level.  Then you drill holes at each far corner from the top.  Feed a flexible saw-blade down one of the holes, then out to the front face through the chainsawed gap.  Join the saw blade up and feed it through a drive (not unlike the method used by brain surgeons to make access panels in the skull).  This makes the side cut.  Repeat on the other side and then the same with the back.  Pull it out and cut it to size using the same flexible saw method illustrated below. The saw blades (cooled by jets of water) are just below the red lines and the drive is the box on the right.  Notice that the drive engine is on rails to maintain the saw tension.

And then comes the lifting and transport.  This clip gives you an idea of the weights involved..

In front of the stubborn block.  I like this picture because I don't think I look like the softy I felt I was among the cavatori

Keara and Franco explaining quarrying to me...

.....and cavatori preparing for the next phase of cutting

With Keara and Franco..I love this picture.  It is a thank you picture.

I left in awe of the cavatori, the ability of Keara and Franco to read the marble in the mountain and the  severed landscape which, at the risk of being environmentally unfashionable, I found beautiful.  The geometric forms cut out of the jagged mountainside made, to me, a beautiful contrast.  And without wishing to stray into the realms of aesthetic wankdom, the flayed rock created a kaleidoscope of visual effects which I found mesmerising.

That said, there are serious environmental issues afoot, of which I know little, that deserve a mention.

It is an ineluctable fact that if you keep taking 3 x 1.5 x 1.5 m blocks of rock out of a mountain, one day you will not have a mountain.  And then what happens to all those patterns that nature has established over millions of years?

The best I can do is point you at studies, and both established and incipient campaigns.

You will find relevant links in this post at the ever-informative and up-to-the-minute local English language blog Art is Life

Later in the week I visited two quarries up from Serravezza.  The marble up there is, I believe, called Cardoso.  Remote and fantastical places these quarries

The ceiling of an access tunnel that once grounded where the faced rock gives way to crag in the picture.

View up one of the holes drilled to feed the saw blades through..dia approx 10 cm.

The stocking seam line is, I assume, from the first turn of the flexible blade before it tensed and bit into the upper part of the tunnel hole.  However, I cannot explain the dog leg about 3/4 of the way up.

The area silhouetted by blue sky would once have been rock..

Buggered toe

Post dated: 12th December 2012

During the roughing out of the self-portrait, I decided to switch boots.

As a result of a football accident about 20 years ago, my right big toe joint is completely buggered: calcified, arthritic and, at times, agonising.  The pain, when the joint flexes, is exacerbated by cold.  Therefore, when the weather changed, I swapped my steel toeys, which are bendy, for walking boots, which have steel rods in the soles. These stop the joint from moving up and back and are, consequently, beautiful in comfort.  But they do not have steel toecaps.

When, and this is when the barrel starts coming back down in the story, I loosed a ham sized piece of marble from the block with my pitcher, it fell right onto my left toe breaking not only the nail, but the bone beneath it.

  

This is a 12 certificate trailer to the snuff movie it later became.

 I have, temporarily, a brace of buggered toes.

Self portrait

Post dated: 3rd December 2012


For the final three weeks of the residency, I am going to begin a self portrait. It is to be twice life size and in marble.

I want to do this for a number of reasons.

Portrait sculpture commissions have made up a large part of my work and I have some facility with the genre.  However, the form involves someone else and the emotional impact of work is, inevitably, tied up with the personality and reputation of the subject.  Portraiture is, by dint of its commemorative function, limited to some degree in its creative and exploratory potential.  At least mine is. (Lucien Freud is a good example of someone who made portraits more about his own journey than the marking of a particular moment in another's.  And he chose his subjects rather than being chosen by them.)

Self portraiture is more subjective and self-exploratory than portraits of others.  I hope that mine will not become a vortex of either self-aggrandisement or self-flagellation of course.  I hope, instead, that it will enrich the current journey.  Applying for and following through this residency in Pietrasanta has been a significant step in this and to wrap up my time here with a new direction will be apt.

Moreover, I want to learn how to transfer and enlarge a plaster model into stone using the traditional techniques of marble carving.  I do a lot of enlargement etc in my own work, but it is always in steel and clay which are infinitely modal materials.  Although the principles are the same with carving, how you locate points (raised or flush nail heads that form the base camp from which the triangulation happens) in space varies due to the finite act of chipping away stone.  And you have to take the grain direction (and any faults) of the stone into account.

I am doubling the size of my model.  This is a fairly straightforward step up.  For less complete ratios, they use a nifty piece of geometry; of which more later.

The first step is to rough out a life size self portrait in clay.  The block is just behind the clay head.

I talk over the procedures with artisans and sculptors such as Eppe de Haan (below) who works at Studio Sem.

The finished clay

I then take a plaster mould from the clay

...cast a plaster positive from the mould and place my measuring points so that they coincide, proportionally, with the sides and top of the block.

I then find the corresponding points on and in the block...the relative position of the nose point, for example, is ringed in red....

...and start roughing out the form

This is as far as I got in the time. I will bring it to a conclusion once it is shipped to my studio in England. Working with this has opened up a fresh set of forms for me.  The language that works for clay just does not work in stone.  And how this language will feed into my portrait sculpture is filling me with anticipation.