Marble's Elusive Fruit

By Steve Shaheen (MFA 2005)

After six weeks in seaside Carrara, the skin is tan, the body sore, the stomach accustomed to heaping portions of carbohydrates, and the New York grind a fleeting bad dream.  The rust has finally been scraped off my Italian, but my brain is amply scrambled from constant translation, so much so that I am now responding to Italians in English and Americans in Italian.

The days are long, and the hardcore among us work from 7am to 9:30pm. Sculpting in natural daylight is infinitely better than under studio lights, and there is a local adage that reinforces this: Che si fa di notte si vede di giorno (what you do by night you see by day).  In Carrara there is no sense of a relaxed Mediterranean culture that is perpetually tardy and punctuated by siestas; as long as the sun shines and blood stirs in your veins, you work.

What is work?

Work is donning a respirator, safety glasses, ear protection and gloves to dive into a clamorous white mist of strenuous and irrevocable decision making.  Work is subduing a writhing pneumatic hammer that delivers 6,000 blows per minute, and submitting its abusive concussions to a mass of 200-million-year-old crystallized marine skeletons with the hope that somehow all this violence will eventually make sense.  Work is cradling a 2400-watt angle grinder with 9-inch blade screaming at 10,000 rpm, three inches from your hands, as you whittle a block of marble that was moved by a crane at breakfast into something you can hoist with one arm by lunch.

This is the world of contemporary stone sculpture, at least to those of us remaining who do our own work.  It's not for everyone.

But Heena Kim (MFA 2014) and Josh Henderson (MFA 2015) have assimilated disconcertingly well into this severe and otherworldly gulag.  After the first few days I realized they were hopelessly corrupted, and no dust or noise or consternating technical hurdle would sway them.  Something about the beauty of the material, the direct engagement with it, the challenge of the process--as well as the hope for what it might someday become--holds a transfixing allure for those who taste of marble's elusive fruit.  Heena and Josh are approximately halfway through their pieces.  In general, however long it takes you to rough out and model your forms on a stone sculpture, you can calculate the same time to rasp, sand and finish the work. While accolades are premature, Heena and Josh have so far done exceptionally well.  After four years of leading this residency (Quentin McCaffrey 2011, Joseph Brickey 2012, Heather Personett and Zoe Swenson-Taylor 2013), I feel spoiled by Academy students' level of preparedness and their ability to jump into one of the most technically challenging media available to artists.  

Italy is a place of surprises, whether it's discovering your rental car's spare tire has a hole in it while on the shoulder of a highway, or your train catching on fire.  In addition to these memorable occurrences, we've had many pleasant impreviste.  Highlights include: Josh and Heena's invitation to participate in Carrara Marble Week (an art and design fair in the city's historic center); a lunch with American expatriate, painter/engraver Robert Carroll; admission to a closed room in the Bargello for a private viewing of Bernini's Costanza Bonarelli; a six-hour hike in the green mountains above Camaiore.  Josh also claims that he is surprised to discover that olive oil tastes like olive oil, and tomatoes taste like tomatoes.

I'm about to leave the land of vermentino and spaghetti allo scoglio for the concrete and steel jungle I call home.  Check out more details about the Carrara residency on Josh Henderson's blog.

Alla prossima,
Steve Shaheen

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This summer Steve Shaheen (MFA 2005) led a two-week stone carving residency in Carrara, Italy generously sponsored by ABC Stone.  The residency  promotes the use of stone in artistic practice by pairing young artists with master sculptors for experimental learning through intensive mentoring.  

Finally, Some Progress

Josh Henderson is one of two Academy students learning the ways of stone carving during a summer residency at the Studio Corsanini in Carrara, Italy.  The residency made possible by ABC Stone aims to promote the use of stone in artistic practice by pairing young artists with master sculptors for experimental learning through intensive mentoring.  As a neophyte stone carver, Josh's learning curve is as steep as the mountains that surround him. While it may seem that time no longer qualifies as a valid measurement of progress, Josh's biggest triumph has been learning the lesson of patience. 

Get a glimpse of life in Carrara as Josh takes us through one stone cold day at the studio:  

Joshua Henderson (MFA 2015) writes: 

Finally! After many days of carving stone at Studio Corsanini in Carrara, Italy,  I've made enough progress to show something. However, it's still really rough.  It's probably the equivalent ten minutes of drawing or some ridiculous thing like that.  Just imagine how much longer finishing the carving process would be.  Here's how it all begins:

 

Steve, Leo, and Andrea move the stone from the stone yard to the saw.

Andrea and Leo place the model on the stone in order to take more accurate measurements for cutting. This is where I think Andrea said something sassy to Leo and then Leo gave him that "I'm your boss look" I don't really know if that happened for sure because I don't speak Italian but I think I'm close.

 ...and then the first cutting happens...

 Once the stone is cut to size the carving process begins. Points (measurements) are taken from the model and marked onto the stone with what is called macchinetta di punta. This machine was perfected by the old master stone carver Antonio Canova and is still used today. It is only used when carving 1:1 This is called the indirect method to stone carving.

  This is how it looks today after just over a week of roughing out. You can see that it is far from resolved. In Bargue's drawing method I've pretty much just started. 

 

And then after a long day of carving ...you go to the beach :) to rest up and do it all over again in the morning.

 

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Throughout the summer, Josh and classmates will be sharing their experiences on the Academy's blog.  Stay tuned for more updates.

Carrara Part II: Initiation into an Ancient Tradition

June 18 - July 3, 2012, recent Academy graduate Joseph Brickey (MFA 2012) lived and worked in Carrara, Italy as part of a two-week Artist in Residence Program sponsored by ABC Stone and The Oriano Galloni Foundation, and coordinated by artist Stephen Shaheen (MFA 2005).

The Apuan Alps, where white marble has been quarried for thousands of years

By Joseph Brickey (MFA 2012)
 
Upon arriving in Pisa, Steve Shaheen was there to greet me and drive me to Carrara. From the highway I could see the Apuan Alps, with large passages of white where the mountains had been stripped bare from thousands of years of marble quarrying. 

Looming above the Italian landscape with a kind of scarred majesty, the sight seemed to strike a chord deep within me.  The swathes of white marble appeared in the distance as patches of snow, reminding me of the mountains in my home state of Utah.  But there was something further, faint yet familiar, that I felt tugging at my roots.  These white scars on the mountain face seemed to whisper me a welcome, the ageless echo of a common cause, an ancient vestige of a shared passion.  I’d come to the heartland of a people who for countless generations had shared my deep and unique love for this material called white marble.  In a peculiar way, I felt I’d come home.

After ditching my luggage at Villa Acero, we went straight to Studio Corsanini, where I'd spend the next two weeks carving my piece in marble. The workshop owned by Luigi Corsanini is well known in the marble carving world of Tuscany, Luigi himself being recognized for his knowledge of the classical tradition, as well as the quality of his workmanship.

Three generations of Corsanini stone carvers

In this modern age of power tools and technology, very few learn the old ways of working with marble. But the craft lives on in the Corsanini family, a way of life and a family tradition.  It's a beautiful thing to see: a rare and difficult skill that just seems to be in the blood, unifying generations and preserving the mastery of an ancient method. Such a flame is easily quenched, and in the world at large it nearly has been, but it yet burns brightly in this little pocket of Tuscany, undisturbed by the changes all about.

Young Niccolo Corsanini at work

Among the dozens of marble workshops in the area, Studio Corsanini is unique in many ways, one being the way international artists work together with homegrown artisans.  Blood, sweat, and tears are not just metaphorical terms here, but the real ingredients of comradery.  Add marble dust to the mix, and you have a motley group of rare individuals becoming tangibly bound together, from being one percenters in the world to being 100 percenters in the workshop.  How fortunate that I'd landed here of all places!

Kuetani and Steve working at Studio Corsanini

Sculptor Itto Kuetani finishing his latest marble

Master craftsman Massimo at work

After selecting the stone of my choice, it was cut down to size.  This block of marble would become the island of my new adventure, the prison of my new labor, the field of my new battle.  Everything outside of it only existed to serve my life within it.  On it I would stake my claim in a tradition that makes the laborer noble, dirty work honorable, every move immortal, and—come to think of it—every failure famous!  I felt I had entered a marathon on a tightrope.

measuring the model

establishing cardinal points

Massimo blurring the divide between speed & precision

marking the marble block

marking the mastic on the model

finding point on the marble

Massimo measuring depth

the first cuts into the block

The marble block after the first stages

Check back here for more of Joseph's reflections on his residency and first experience working with stone.

Did you miss Joseph's other posts on his experience in Carrara? Read Carrara: The Impossible Dream and Carrara Part III: Reduced to the Dust by Marble.