• On rolls

    sculpture
    turning a new leaf4
    ‘Turning A New Leaf’ in the hall

    The statue "Ferns’ went on a trip to North Brabant today. There it had to go over a narrow gravel path, a set of steps and a threshold, and up to the end of the hall. How do you do that with a sculpture of more than 600 kilos? Well, just, like they did it in the olden days. On rolls.

    But his little brother was still in the way: the customer had temporarily my sculpture ‘Turning A New Leaf‘ on loan, while I worked on their sculpture. But with four man, a hoist, wooden rollers from pieces of railing, and a wooden frame for the sculptures, it's all worked out well.

    Garden sculpture and interior sculpture

    0019others
    detail of ‘Turning A New Leaf’

    However instructive it is to maneuver with a heavy stone sculpture in a limited space, it was even more instructive to see how different one sculpture looks from the other one. The granite piece (Turning A New Leaf) is slightly taller, but because it's almost the same color as the surroundings, it nearly blends in. It also has a very rough surface.

    It's meant for in a garden, where it will gather algae and moss and engage in a kind of interaction with the environment. The base of that sculpture is also quite heavy, because later all kinds of plants will grow around it, hiding the base from the viewer and making the sculpture seem as if it has grown up between the plants. That base also provides a counterweight, So even without anchoring it would stand firmly.

    completed ferns (2others)
    detail of 'Ferns’

    An indoor sculpture requires a different approach. I like it when you can touch and feel sculptures,  and in that I'm certainly not the only one. That is why 'Ferns’ is much easier to the touch, with a smooth polished skin and curly shapes. The base plate is much thinner, and octagonal instead of square. What they do share is that the light behind the corridor plays through the sculpture from the garden. That was also a specific request of the customer, and the cause of the similarities between the two images.

    Ferns placement

    I was quite happy to see the sculpture on the spot for which it was designed, and to find that it's doing what was intended: being an eye-catcher and keeping the attention indoors without blocking the garden completely. The dog seems to like it in any case.

    Nasty the first message about this project.

  • A thorough dislike of measuring

    background, vanH, coat of arms

    Long live the copyshop! The title of this post is obviously a bit exaggerated. A sculptor in stone can't avoid taking measurements every once in a while.

    • coat of arms, family crest carved in Elm wood, coat of arms relief
    • I really don't like having to remember numbers. There must be another way

    How to avoid measuring

    calipers

    There are several ways in which I try to avoid that I should measure with a tape measure when I have to copy or enlarge something. For example, while carving my previous sculpture, 'Ferns’, I made the model in a scale of 1 at 4 when he. From that I took the sizes with a compass, which I then 'walked' four times across the piece of stone, so there would be no digits to convert. Whenever I needed to convert sizes with a calculator, or out of my head, or just needed to measure and reproduce something, I'd sometimes already forgotten the numbers once I'd stepped away from my model. So then I have to get back, measure again, remember, and measure on the new piece, draw the measurements, etc.. I once did that, in the beginning, and soon got tired of it. Hence the compass. Or calipers, or pointing machine, or…. but no, I'm not going to tell all my tricks. In any case I like it if I don't need to think too much, and when the measuring process takes as little attention as possible. Sorry, but sometimes I think I'd rather be lazy than tired.

    Reliefs

    It's even easier for reliefs. Just ake a picture in the correct size, lay that on the stone, and transfer it to the stone. Then all I need to do is carve it out, easy as that. Of course I won't tell you all the tricks I've discovered over the years. But the main trick is that of course I'm not going to magnify such a picture with grids. Or print on A4 sheets and stick them together with adhesive tape. I emailed the picture to the copy shop, and they enlarged it to about 120 cms, and Koen is done.

    Day 1

    day1-2

    So today I started carving the coat of arms of the family Van Heeckeren. After cutting the slab of sandstone round and transferring the image I've made a start with the profiled edge. Also, I put three loose lifting anchors in the background material of the stone, for a round stone is very hard to hoist properly. Imagine it happening, it's all finished and slips out of the slings! We can't have that. So I put in two lifting pins just above the center. They're drilled slightly upwards , so they clamp themselves, and for horizontal lifting, there is a third pen at the bottom. Finally, I started ‘jig sawing‘ the relief, so I no longer need to measure a lot of things!

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