In the previous two articles, here and here, I explained that the eight statues we've taken down from the Minervalaan 28-30 arrived in a very battered state. There ware several serious fractions and sometimes quite a loss of detail.
In addition, in the distant past they had already been repaired with a very hard mortar, which had started to detach from the surface in many places. The multiple paint layers didn't help this either. Time to repair them and make a reconstruction before we were going to carve the copies.
← Detail of the image Winter. Old repairs and rusty iron staples are clearly visible on the eroded pieces of of its surface.
Glue-up
In particular the right hand Faun, the lady of Autumn and the Diggin Man of Winter came down in several pieces. Pressure from the building that rested on it and seeping rainwater will probably be to blame for this.
Because these sculptures are not going to be restored, but will be copied, glue-up was not a complicated matter in this case. Just gather up all the pieces, find out how they fit, fill the fracture surfaces with glue, and clamp them right up.
Moisture transport
Now this is not something you can do anywhere. Suppose a sculpture is to be reinstalled in an outdoor environment, then you'll be dealing with moisture penetrating it. That moisture will eventually have to come out again, and it will follow a transport process from top to bottom and from the inside to the outside. Should it encounter a full dense glue layer on that journey, then problems will be guaranteed.
Over a horizontal glue surface, for example, the moisture above the glue will remain within the stone for a long time, and it's difficult to get it out sideways. The result will be a strong deterioration of the stone above the glue layer, especially in a frost period after a wet fall or winter. So what we have done here with saturated glue surfaces was only possible because these sculptures are no longer placed outside.
Old repairs
After the bonding we started looking for the original shapes of the sculptures. In some cases this meant that we had to remove large chunks of old repairs. Sometimes too much material had been applied, which particularly ended up making legs too plump, with thick edema ankles. Not all repairs have been removed; we also counted on it that we would be carving a lot of details in the major volumes later on, in the phase of sculpting in the new stone.
If you'd remove all repairs, that would also mean a loss of information, all the more so since it irrevocably comes off only while taking a layer of the original sculpture with it. The underlying stone is much softer than the tough cement repairs that were often very much stuck onto it.
Shedding its skin
Not all repairs were stuck on that much. Due to this barely permeable repair layer, and especially in combination with that dense layer of latex paint, moisture was building up within the underlying tuff. As mentioned in the previous post, there was a rainpipe hidden in the facade on the right façade corner, which dripped its moisture into the statuettes for years.
The result was rich algae bloom, peeling skin of the statuettes, and, in the case of the Man Sowing, a total crumbling of the surface. I already mentioned that for this reason recovery was no longer a solution. The repairs would one day, in the future, just come back down, underlying stone and all.
Photographic material
For carving a good reconstruction in new stone, it was necessary to have usable models, based on the old statuettes. In this case we repaired the sculptures with a soft type of plaster. For this, I first collected as much photo material as possible, in particular from the sculptures on the other side of the street, which were in a much better state. A year and a half earlier I'd also taken a lot of photos of the views of each statue : from the left, left front, front view, front right, and right.
I first printed and laminated these photos on A3 format, but those big prints were very awkward to handle. I discovered that a small book with all views in size A5 was much more convenient: because you can quickly browse through those. Ideally, these booklets would be printed on plastic, so that they wouldn't be susceptible to moisture and rain, But luckily paper also worked.
Who does what?
Jelle and I took on the reconstruction of three statuettes each. Jelle the ladies from Spring and Summer and the left Faun with a goat, and I the Digging Man of Winter, the lady of Autumn and the right hand Faun with his deer. Tim enthusiastically started working on the old woman of Winter and the Sowing Man of Spring.
Plaster needs to set between the layers and we also needed time to assess the right shape, so this was work that we undertook in phases, sometimes in addition to other projects of sculpting at the same time.
Loss of information
During such a reconstruction you will always be faced with puzzle work when sculptures are so weathered. Details are no longer easy to trace back and you need to make choices. Which version is correct? That what we think to recognize here on this statue, or what is still visible on the other side of the street? It became clear that earlier restorers have not always known it either. Flat circles turned out to be the sunflowers of the Summer, and vague lines became ears of wheat or bunches of grapes.
We noticed that the four Muses of the seasons also depicted four phases of life: the young girl stands for Spring, the young woman for Summer, the mature woman for the Fall and the old woman for the Winter. Each had their own attibutes: flowers for Spring, ears of wheat and sunflowers for Summer, vines, grapes and apples for Autumn, and a cloak for Winter.
The lines of their hair also started to become much more defined as soon as we patched up the missing pieces: they continued into the facade.
Tim's Man Sowing
I've already mentioned it a few times before: the Man Sowing was the worst case. There was actually no recognizable detail anymore at all, and after dismantling even less was left of it
. Once crumbs are still hanging on with their last edge, just a touch would be enough to lose those as well. But we already knew that in advance, hence all those photos.
Now in addition to his work for me Tim also works as a volunteer at Museum De Dageraad, where everything can be found about the buildings of the Amsterdam School. And what do you know, he just happens to find the original plaster model of our missing sower hanging there, on the wall!
To make a long story short: he was allowed to borrow it for his reconstruction, and in return, he suggested that he would restore this plaster model (which he did beautifully and in a careful way!) and then, based on this plaster model, he was able to reconstruct the entire tuffstone Sower again .
The Man Digging
I myself had taken on the reconstruction of the Man Digging from Winter. He was missing his lower legs, the clogs and the shovel, and other details had become very unclear. However, the upper body was still so sharp that the original chisel strokes of Jaap Kaas still reappeared from under the thick paint layer.
This showed that the sculptor had finished his statuettes at the time with various chisels: the round chisel, the claw chisel and various flat chisels. This would give us guidance later during the sculpting in stone.
The Man Digging had something else that was unclear next to his shovel. It looked the most like a continuous beam with a jumble above it. After studying all the photos, I thought it could represent a bare tree, which is being planted by Man Digging.
Gallery: reconstruction of all figurines step by step
After this repair round an inspection followed. Once everything was approved, we went on to the next phase: carving them into new stone. Read more about this in the next blog post.
Jelle and I are halfway there with the modeling work on the griffin
Continuing with the large griffin
It's a project with long interruptions, because there's always work coming in between that seems to be much more pressing. But last summer there was a holiday period in which Jelle and I could get to work to finally shape the large mirrored griffins. In my last post on this, from more than a year earlier, I said that these two mirrored griffins will probably be cast in concrete. But I got good news from the customer: on closer inspection he preferred sandstone originals to concrete casts. We can proceed to carving them in stone! I decided that this is quite a big project for me alone and that I would like to make it togetherwith Jelle Steendam both the modelling and the carving. With the combination of both our senses of shape and an extra pair of hands, this will become a great piece of sculpture that I am extremely enthusiastic about.
Not foam but clay
I had already started to enlarge my scale model in hard foam. But the work was not to my liking. I could not get the suppleness that I had in mind and decided to do it differently and thus, I wanted to model the griffin in clay. The first step was a sturdy frame. I drew a contour template from my scale model, enlarged this to the desired scale and sawed it out of a sheet of wood. Then I welded together a steel frame from square profile tube for the griffin. I could roughly model the body of the griffin out of wire mesh and fix it to the frame, and filled with polyurethane foam. I made the wings removable.
Shield
Then came the modeling of the shield. The shield is such an intricate movement of parts with all kinds of details that at first it was difficult to read from the small pictures. When we were almost done with all the casts, the client sent us a whole series of razor-sharp photos showing that I had been very close to the original. But there was also new information that we discovered on them which we will certainly incorporate in the reconstruction. I had already spent many hours in photo editing to find out what it once had looked like.
A colleague noted that he was more likely to use such old photos as a guide to make his own animals than to make an exact copy of them. There is also something to be said for that. But for myself it has been a challenge to reconstruct and approach the level of the old griffins. It has made me a better sculptor. And it is also a very educational project for Jelle. He has a lot more modeling experience than I do and is also better acquainted with making plaster caps. But doing it on this scale is new to him too! So together we learn a lot. Only when we really start carving will we be on familiar territory; we have done that many times before.
I made a one-sided cap from the shield and with the help of Jelle also a plaster cast. We could use this for further modeling work on the griffin's body.
Teeny tiny knights
The shields are also both different. They both have a family crest on it, one is of Graf Von Klot-Trautvetter with two helmets and two knights with banners and lances and a motto, and the other of Graf Von Bohlen, with five griffins and three helmets and the weapon motto "Cave Gryphem". These family coats of arms alone are extremely laborious pieces, so this is a project we will be spending a lot of weeks on in addition to the time we needed to model it in clay.
The general shape of the shield I had also modeled n clay and cast in plaster. I did not model that whole family crest, because that is a lot of work that you cannot transfer anyway with the copying saw. I could better carve it directly into the stone, which is much faster once the drawing's transferred onto it. A good example for this is the large family crest with two griffins that I installed in 2013 in sandstone.
The body of the griffin
Then came step three: modeling the body, the wings and the tail. This was the point where Jelle could also come into action. Together we shaped the griffin in a number of days of intensive modeling. Clay can naturally dry out and shrink, so it was very nice that we could do this together in a shorter time. The griffin will be 115 cm tall and the shield 122 cms wide, so that was hard work.
Plaster molds
But you can't do much with a clay model. When it dries out, it will crack and disintegrate. When wet, it can sag or become damaged. That is why we have used up a gigantic load of plaster to arrive at a plaster model. We were satisfied with the expression of the clay griffin, so that we could proceed to step 3: Placing plaster molds over it.
First I took off the wings and tail and made separate plaster molds for those. Then we made, in an intensive rhythm of mixing plaster, putting on a thin layer of plaster in color and applying a thicker layer over it, a plaster mold for the belly of the griffin. The last two molds were for the griffin's head. We definedthe seams with strips of metal, in this case cut from a sheet of zinc that I still had. Finally, the two molds for the left and right half of the griffin followed.
Castings
After that Jelle and I made casts of each mold part. We had mixed a good load of glass fiber through the plaster, so that the casts could remain thin. Finally, we joined the loose parts together with more plaster, which we smeared over the seams from within. Overall, we now have a hollow griffin of approx 8 cms thick, that we can still handle a bit.
But the statue was still encased in the plaster molds! That is why we have also been busy for a few days to carve away all the molds from the plaster cast. Fortunately, we had added a little red dye to the inner layer of the plaster molds, allowing us to see when we were getting close to the final surface. We ended up with a bunch of casts, which may not have been perfect according to the views of professional mold makers, but more than sufficient quality for our copying saw and also good enough for a maquette to start sculpting from.
Mirrored
This griffin will later on be carved in stone. And just like all those flying buttress figurines of the past years, it is first sawn on the sculpture sawing machine. For this we need a sturdy model that does not depress when a follower disc rests on it. I could've also cut the beast out of foam and covered it with polyester, but with this method we were more flexible with the design. After all, you can easily remove and add clay, and with foam that becomes more difficult.
But the griffin will become two different griffins, a left version and a right one. They need to be mirrored and that means the front legs, the claws, sit differently with one version than with the other. I thought we could first cut out and sculpt one griffin, and that we will then adjust the plaster legs of the model so that the right claw holds the shield and it rests on the left.
Ordered some sandstone
For these two griffins, the two shields, the four wings and the two tails I have now ordered a batch of Obernkirchener sandstone. The quarry informed me that it will take a while to find good blocks of such a large size for the sculptures. But I really wanted this type of stone, although it is very dense and quite difficult to carve. But it is extremely weather resistant and has a beautiful color. Above all, the material is very strong. I had cut a slice of approx 1 cm thick, about 15 x 15 cms wide, and I couldn't break it with my hands. And yet I still have quite a lot of strength in my fingers. This is a perfect property for my purposes, because these beasts will be standing on 1 front leg, and the shield, the wings and tail are not very thick either. This way they can last a few centuries.
