Close to the stone

["Clive Murray-White" <cow_artclive@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

Its nice to see that we all get into "close to stone" just as much as
"acid".

It triggered such an emotional response in me because one of the experiences
that had the effect of encouraging me to transfer from my old modernist
sculpture ways to something a little more rewarding was seeing a couple of
Nicola Pissano sculptures at the Sienna Duomo Museum.

They had been removed from the cathedral because they had deteriorate badly
over time. You could call it "natural erosion" or "acid rain". I'm not
really sure which camp my views would fall into but  what was most
interesting from my perspective was that what ever had caused the erosion
had also livened up the stone, there's a similar example outside Lichfield
Cathedral UK.

I think the sculpture is of Charles 1 or 2 but that's not particularly
important, this sculpture has also been so badly effected by "time" that it
looks like a caricature, he ( this stone figure) almost looks as if he can
skip into life at the drop of a hat, I'm not sure how much this has to do
with the fact that concern over his "deterioratisation" caused some well
meaning souls to build a little shelter over him, of course this just
reinforces the ludicrousness of the visual situation and makes the sculpture
look as it is standing in a door-way saying hello to everybody that goes by.

I had, like many people, always responded to eroded natural forms, those
ready made Henry Moore's that litter beaches throughout the world but
responding to the eroded Pisano's was a little different. It has been
reinforced thousands of times since as I study antiquity after
antiquity..... damage and erosion seem to have the potential to make stone
live.

What is really most interesting from my perspective, in our discussion about
power tools, acid and other devices that we find ourselves using as we
perpetually attempt to unlock the full range of expressive potentials of the
particular stone that we may happen to be working with is that...when we
look at the way nature forms stone, or, how time effects stone we are left
with a pretty sobering message, sand blasting is nature's way, maybe the
sand is applied to the stone in lots of water most of the time but basically
the beach side Henry Moore's have been sandblasted and the eroded Pissano's
were acid etched, no human hand, no hand guided tool, no evidence of human
interaction at all. Just Acid and Sandblasting.

To balance things just a bit, I think the real point in all of this is that
stone is an immensely flexible medium, to my way of thinking an unrivalled
material, not just for its own sake but because it, in sculptural terms,
offers as much genuine freedom to the artist as drawing. Its fabulous
advantage is derived from the fact that we work it direct, there is no
intermediary like casting and probably most importantly of all it is the
material that all humans, for what ever reasons, have always chosen to use
when they felt they needed to make very important statements.

Talk soon Clive