[Music]
Well marble is the Emperor of all stones everything else just has to bow down
to it, this block it's like a slice of the moon, the Romans used to call it 'luna stone' because
it's just beautiful and it has this light that almost shines out of it, it's wonderful to carve.
I'm making a copy of the Prato Pulpit which was made by Donatello in the early 15th century. The
pulpit was on the outside of the cathedral in Prato. It's a very interesting piece because I
mean Donatello was very early Renaissance and he's evolving from Gothic towards a different style,
and the cherubs dancing I think are about a metre high so obviously we've scaled it
down quite a lot. The difficulty of copying something and making it look like the original,
but trying to keep the spirit of the original, and making the one you're working on work in itself.
The drawing is more of a diagram than a drawing for the sake of it and I'm
working out which bits are high which bits are low, where they are in relation to each other,
what the shape is so then I can set into the stone knowing quite where I'm going with everything.
Because I hadn't got access to the original I could only work from photographs which are
good for a drawing because they give you the picture plane but they don't show you what's
going on from another angle and the depths are – there's a bit of guesswork going on,
which is another reason for doing a drawing because you can start, maybe you're not solving
the problems but you can see where the problems might arise and start giving it some thought.
The traditional chisels are metal chisels that have been
tempered and drawn out by a blacksmith, nowadays we use tungsten tip chisels,
they're the very same thing and you still hit them with a hammer but tungsten is a
kind of ceramic and it stays sharper longer so it's much easier to use, much more convenient.
The advantage of a grid is it's a way of just plotting points and mapping out where the main
forms are, once you start carving everything you mark on the surface just disappears because in
a drawing it might look like it's next to each other, where two sections intersect,
but actually one side's a lot lower than the other so you can't really draw that
you just have to put the big shapes on and carve those in and let things form.
Once it's marked out on the stone the first thing I always think of is removing as much
stone as possible so if there's a big kind of blank area start with that and also with
this project we know how far back I've got to carve, so how much depth I've got to play with,
and all the time when you're carving you decide to start somewhere, you start working in there,
and you're almost taking readings of how the stone's cutting, how it's breaking off,
how much you can take off, how sharp your chisels are, what angle you need to do because working
marble in particular you have to be technically correct because it's translucent and the light
travels through the surface of the stone before it bounces back, if you use a blunt chisel or
you hit it too hard you can crush the crystals which leaves what's called a bruise or a stun
mark in the marble, and this mark is below the surface of what you want, or it can be,
so you have to re-carve it to get rid of the stun mark, so you need to keep your chisel
sharp and you need to be not over ambitious, just tap away, nibble away at the marble.
And the overall thing is like a mantra you always put the form in before any details, you get the
big shapes all running into each other before you go in and start putting detail ,and each tool you
use for as long as possible because it takes off more than the subsequent tool or the tool
you're about to use, so you use it as much as you can until you realise you're looking around for
somewhere to chisel and there's nowhere left so you think well I better get onto the smaller tool.
The claw tool's the real key to it all really because it's like sketching with a chisel,
it really is, you're running over the forms and you come over the other way it's kind of like
crosshatching in a drawing, all the flat chisel does is remove the high points the claw tool has
left and so the ridges that stick up, you're just taking that off and also you are seeing
how the light plays on it, I mean it's all about trapping shadows, carving is all about having deep
cuts here and lighter here and the angle here and how the light plays on it and certainly in relief
because relief carving like this it's kind of halfway between sculpture and drawing, if you're
doing a three-dimensional sculpture, if a form runs around the back you just carve it so it goes
around the back, but with this you have to give the illusion of it running around the back like
a drawing, you've got to make something look like it turns around and comes out the other side even
though it really is just going into the block, and that's all about angles and shadow and light.
So when it's all flattened with the flat chisel then we go on with the tool we call
a rasp which is a kind of file basically and you're just taking the flats out but
you have to be careful not to undo all the hard work you've done with the chisels.
And then the pumice stone just to take the marks of the file out. Again each chisel you
use is almost just to get rid of the marks the previous one made, and then maybe you'll have
different textures for different materials so in that carving maybe you'll leave the hair
a little rougher than the skin and maybe the drapery you'll have a different finish on that.
I suppose it's a bit like driving a car, after a while it becomes second nature to
change gear and steer and you're just watching what's happening around you
and so it becomes second nature I think to use the chisels and keep them sharp,
all you concentrate on really are the forms you're carving.
And also with this project I wanted to keep the spirit of the thing because they are joyful and
they're happy and they're dancing so I'm trying to copy the Donatello as much as I can although the
one here is a lot smaller than the original and I've had to kind of squeeze them together a bit to
get in the A4 size, but the most important thing with any copies is the spirit of the thing so it
needs to obviously look like the Donatello but I'm hoping to give it as much joy as the Donatello.
[Music]