Thoughts & Opinions

FInding My Way to Stone - Nov/Dec 2006

Details: Created: Friday, 01 December 2006 21:47

I consider myself a contemporary/conceptual artist. I was trained in an academy as well as two major universities by well known New York artists. There are only a hand full of artists in galleries that are carving in stone, as galleries tend to think of stone as heavy and breakable. It seems as though carving stone is out of step with the times. So, how does a conceptual artist find her way into to the “classical” world of stone carving? The answer to that is: the long way.

While studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art I choose the path of sculpture early on. I carved wood, modeled clay, welded steel, made plaster moulds and so on. One day a professor looked over my shoulder while I was carving away at a chunk of cherry wood. “You should carve in stone, it’s much easier,” he said. Easier is good. When I showed up in the stone carving area on the second floor of a walk up, I was given a piece of stone, a hammer and a chisel. My introduction was to just whack away on it. Another problem was the stone. It was an old marble door step and very hard. This didn’t seem easy to me, I lasted three days.

It took me five years to complete my bachelor degree, since I lost some credits by transferring to Temple University’s Tyler School of Art after my third year. I then left the United States and went to Italy.

In Rome, I sought out a family friend to get an orientation. This sculptor lived in a garret just down the road from the famous Spanish Steps. He showed me the bronze work he was doing and I produced letters of introduction from the Academy and a puny portfolio. He said I’d never find what I was looking for in Rome; I needed to go to Pietrasanta. He rattled of a list of merits of this tiny town; its stone carving studios, bronze foundries, super sized kilns for clay work, Mosaic studios, two bars and lots of foreigners. “You could speak english the whole time.” I’d have no need to bother with learning the Italian language.

My jaw may have dropped slightly, but I tried to hide my dismay. I don’t think he understood me or my mission. I needed Rome. I needed its Vatican Collection, its opera, theater, churches and schools. Most of all I needed Italians and their language.

I stayed right there in Rome. While soaking up its marvels, I met an American sculptor named James who was teaching art classes at an American grade school. He worked in stone and had started carving in Pietrasanta. After seeing each other for sometime he asked if I wanted to go there with him. He was in need of tools and that was the source. I felt safely ensconced in one of the most fascinating cities in the world, and I knew no tiny town could lure me away. A weekend trip with this pretty boy would be just that, a trip.

Pietrasanta is about 30 miles north of Pisa. The name means holy stone, which refers not to marble, but to the large stone at which people knelt for beheading. There is a plaque in the central piazza claiming Michelangelo slept here while making some sort of arrangement with a client for stone. Since then, the town has been a place where stone is carved. In the early 50’s Henry Moore put the town on the map with the carving of his Reclining Figure for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. This work took two years to complete and brought the world press to the studios of Pietrasanta. Today there are hundreds of studios between here and Carrara, and artists from all over the world come to work in its many art factories.

But I knew myself as an artist. The planning that went into stone carving was just not for me. When it comes to art, I usually jump in with both feet, trusting in some kind of eventual, positive outcome. There was a lot of very serious stone carving going on in Pietrasanta. There were miles of stone moving like rivers, and silky white figures everywhere whose sensual cold stare taunted my reactionary feminist attitude.

My friend and I ended up at a studio where Issamu Noguchi’s piece for the Venice Biennial was being fabricated. Giorgio Angelini’s studio was in Ripa, a town well off the beaten path. Noguchi’s piece, all white marble, was a monumental slide. You entered through a set of stairs on one side, climbed to the top and slid down polished marble to exit on the opposite side. Noguchi’s sculpture was fun, putting a smile on even the most hardened of art critic’s faces. But, it was huge and being carved by some of the area’s best artisans. I still could not see myself doing this.

All of the studios in and around Pietrasanta have work space for artists. The spaces at Giorgio’s were an ample 10’ square and there were 5 or 6 artists in residence. I was drawn to one space in particular because it was so very different from anything I’d seen so far. This studio was the kind of place I could work in.

There were no pantographs there; no copying going on, each work was the result of laborious play time with the stones. Stones were being inserted into larger freshly quarried blocks of marble using words and symbols creating an enigma of cities and cultures that do, and don’t, exist. For the first time I saw playfulness applied to this precious material, producing a serious and thought provoking piece. I wanted to stay and play. The artist was nowhere in sight but the workers told me he was Canadian and had a partial paralysis in his hands. His name was Daniel Couvreur, and when we finally did meet a few years later we became great friends. Daniel changed my life and the way I thought about stone.

I returned to Rome, packed up and moved. I spent the next decade plus in that tiny town with its foreigners and two bars. I still consider myself a contemporary /conceptual artist, but since stone carving is a reactionary, radical thing to do, I have no problem seeing my self as part of the tradition.

A few Days in Vietnam with Ken Burnes: Part 2 - Sept/Oct 2006

Details: Created: Saturday, 02 September 2006 05:31

Editors: When we left Ken Barnes in the last issue, he was describing a typical carving day in Vietnam. Let’s listen in again as Ken picks up the narrative of his unforgettable trip.

Typical day continued

Each of us had at least one helper and one sun shade. The sun shade structure was a flat bamboo rectangle with palm thatch matrix to keep out the sun. You would prop it up on a single bamboo pole and move it during the day to keep yourself in shade. As the 40 days wore on these gradually broke down, as did everything else, making it a scramble each morning to cobble together two poles and some wire to hold up the shade, since the structure had become too loose and wobbly to stand in its original configuration. Everyone else was scavenging for the same material for the same reason, so if you were gone from the site for a day you knew your shade would be disassembled and the parts used to shade two or three other sculptors.

After securing the sun shade in the right position I might have to go looking for a power cord or water hose. I made the mistake of paying no attention to a guy working on the power box next to my stone one day (I was working with a pneumatic tool that day), only to discover the next day that my outlet had been scavenged and a new power line was now snaking its way 150 feet to a sculptor across the way. There was no outlet left for me.

More routine was the theft of my water line. They don’t use water hoses as we do, but braze multiple small copper pipes (think ice maker lines) onto larger copper pipes to make a water manifold. They push small rubber hoses onto these small copper pipes. You take the rubber hose and tie an overhand knot close to the end, slip this knot over the grinder handle such that it is between the grinder body and the handle and with the hose end touching the top of the blade. Not quite as good as center water feed, but pretty damned close. There is no way to turn off the hose, so it runs all night and all day. The site is former delta that has been entirely filled with sand, so the water just disappears into the sand as soon as it comes out of the hose. These flexible hoses also turn out to make good tie-down material for the rickety sun shades, so my 20 foot water hose would frequently find new life as two 10-foot sections of shade tie-down. Entropy. The organizers supplied all needed materials, until they ran out, which was the first week. I frequently found myself thinking “Who was drinking and singing last night? I can steal their hose because they are still in bed.”

We were initially given one brand new 8-inch Metabo grinder per person, with brand new granite or marble blades, our choice. These grinders were worked 10 to 13 hours per day by the helpers, and up to 8 hours per day by the sculptors. By the time I left I would guess two-thirds of the grinders were in a carcass pile in the tool shed. The new blades were used up and most grinders had blades with missing segments. This did not seem to bother the Vietnamese, but I bought my own 4-inch grinder in town and used a blade I had brought from home.

Day 5

I grab a grinder and start carving. I have picked two white marble pieces that have entirely natural surfaces, no quarry marks. One is approximately 8 feet tall by 3 feet by two feet, the other 5 by 5 by 3 feet. A helper shows up shortly thereafter and takes over where I am cutting. I move to another part of the stone to keep the process moving. After a bit my helper either wants to show me something or wants to save me from real work so he moves over and motions to take over my grinder to work where I have been sitting. Not content to sit in the shade like some bwana while my helper keeps going, I pick up his grinder and start working where he left off. That picture repeated itself multiple times throughout the first days, with us doing some strange dance of swapping grinders and chisels and places on the stone. Finally my helper let me do some of the work. By and large the Vietnamese sculptors provided a maquette and the workers did the actual carving, while most of the foreign sculptors wanted to get their hands on the stone themselves.

My hands hurt. I spent 5 hours on the stone today, my helper spent 13. The hammer is heavier than the one I use at home, and my usual job of pounding out reports turns out to be poor training for pounding on rock. In a couple days my grip muscles will adapt and the blisters will abate. I have gone through most of my first bottle of sunscreen. Carole, another light-skinned northwesterner, looks like a lobster tonight. The sunscreen she bought here locally must not be real sunblock. I am changing strategy and will abandon my shorts and t-shirt for long pants and long-sleeved shirt tomorrow. I have only two bottles of sunscreen and will be toast(ed) if I cannot find some genuine SPF here.

More Of The Typical Day

Now it is 8:30 am and I am ready to go to work. It was hot, but I get to turn on my iPod and ear protection and start the fun stuff. Same as in North America, most of my day involved cutting frets, knocking them off, and starting again.

At 11:30 we break for lunch and a two-hour siesta. We are put into tables of eight at the resort’s covered but outdoor restaurant. Lunch will be the same as dinner; rice and an assortment of critters with fruit for desert. We are in the Mekong Delta, so every meal has to include at least one of its six courses being water critter. Some meals had as many as four or five courses of water critter. We learned the rhythm of the kitchen pretty quickly, so that we could mostly predict if it was water or land critter coming next based upon the previous dish. The grand finale (aside from the fruit) was always a big soup pot placed on a burner on the table, and we got great glee out of taking bets on the meat for the soup before removing the lid in a flourish. I found my North American definition of certain foods was far too limiting. When Americans say “chicken soup” we really mean “chicken breast and thigh meat soup.” In Vietnam chicken soup is pretty inclusive, with only the feathers left out. Same with beef and pork. I cannot tell you what part of the pig or cow these meals came from, but the meat to gristle/bone ratio was lower than I am accustomed to. Despite my description, I enjoyed the food quite a bit.

More carving time after the siesta, although I frequently took this hottest part of the day to run into town to wander the market or purchase more air fittings or other needed tool parts. I got pretty good at finding my way to the right stores and buying what I needed without a translator. My language skills were no good, but I learned what example parts to bring and how to draw what I needed, and the shopkeepers were good at referring me to other stores when they could not supply a part. Other times they would go out and purchase what I was looking for, presumably negotiating a better price than I could and keeping the margin.

I would return to the carving site at 3ish and work until about 5:30, at which point I trooped back to the hotel for a shower. Post shower we gathered around some pulled together tables for beer and talk, typically segregated into a large international table and several smaller Vietnamese sculptor tables. We got broken up into 8-person tables for dinner, then would variously regroup for drinking and singing on some nights, or reading in our rooms for others. There was an unspoken agreement that kept our visits to the internet cafes well-spaced, so that we would not all be seeking one of the computers at the same time.

On a couple nights we watched bootleg DVDs projected on the wall of our hotel lobby. Once a week we had artist slide shows, for which I seemed always exhausted, but found to be the best part of the week.

Day 9?

Losing track. Sunday I know. Day off from carving. We played tourist, complete with large A/C bus, large boat, tour guide with a bullhorn, identification cards around our necks. This area doesn’t see so much tourism so we are not viewed as walking ATMs. We are mostly a curiosity. Saw an ethnic Cham mosque, some Cham stores with pretty nice woven fabric, a floating fish farm (netting under someone’s floating house), the border market near Cambodia, and then a “rainforest.” It rains everywhere here, and everything is under water half of the year, so I don’t know what differentiates a rainforest from a clump of trees. Could be a marketing label? The forest itself was unremarkable, mostly 10-15 year old trees replanted after being defoliated by the Americans. But the boat ride there was great, seeing people living along the riverside and the most amazing assortment of hand-built boats. Coming back at twilight we saw the bats mobilize. First one or two, then five, then 20, then 100, all flying across the sky in the same direction. Big fruit bats, more than a foot across, all flapping in the same slow beat.

Too dark to see their features, but light enough that their dark bodies contrasted with the sky.

Thursday, Day 13

My helper has returned. I thought he just got tired of me and wandered off, never to be seen again. In fact he was sick. I put him on the most miserable task of making a big hole in my stone today. He keeps on asking me “all the way through?” and I say “Yes, Yes”. I am sure he is saying “damn, damn”. The first part of the hole is easy going, because the chisel work is at surface level. Once he gets in one foot or more it will be more and more difficult to get a good hammer swing and a good chisel angle inside the hole.

Editor: Stay tuned for the final installment...

Verena Schwippert in Walla Walla - Sept/Oct 2006

Details: Created: Saturday, 02 September 2006 05:24

Her design proposal, pictured here, was accepted by the Washington State Arts Commission for the Art in Public Places program, and by Walla Walla Community College. Now she can start carving.

Verena has been busy with a host of necessary preliminaries which included the following: budget, technical aspects, installation procedure, material and reasons for material choice, dimensions, site selection, production time-line, plaque content and position, and its connection to the building and the surrounding area.

They also had to have images. She supplied a drawing of the three boulder hands with dimensions, one perspective drawing of the whole assemblage, plus an architectural drawing of the site. And, as you see here, she constructed a 3 dimensional model as well.

We will keep you posted on Verena’s progress on this wonderful commission.