• Of Serge van Druten, two athletes and an angel

    background, Restoration, Saint John's Cathedral
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    Serge Van Druten Carving A Marble Rooster
    Sculptor Serge van Druten, 1967-2025. Photo: Hugo Rikken, FullScreen Film

    A difficult request

    In the summer of 2022 I was confronted with a difficult request. My dear colleague Serge van Druten↑ was working on the two limestone statues for the restoration of the Scholten monument in the Stadspark in Groningen. But it didn't go well, he had to be operated on his back and wasn't able to work for a while.

    We agreed that he could work in my studio after the operation, so that we could help him move the statues and help him out- if needed. He'd be starting up very cautiousy and very slowly start working again. And as planned, we got moving. But after a only few days it went wrong: All the ironwork in his back broke off and he had to be operated on again. There was some pressure to this job, it had to be delivered on time, and he asked me if I wanted to finish it. Of course I would have preferred that he could have done it himself, while enjoying working in his own studio. A while earlier I had already carved an angel for him, also because of a surgery. Of course you'd help out a colleague, but knowing that this work was his passion and that he always used to dive into it with a lot of energy, I had a very double feeling about it.

    A long series of operations

    Serge van Druten in 2008

    That back operation later turned out to be one in a long series. He went in and out of the hospital for more than three years, over and over again, and to make it more difficult, he also contracted a degenerative muscle disease. He was never able to sculpt again. I've known Serge since 1993 and from 1995 to 2010 I used to work with him on a daily base, that's why I was very sad when he passed on Wednesday 22 January 2025 , in hospital, 57 years old. He was a special, expressive person, an artist at heart, and has left me with many good memories.

    Car against the monument

    The damaged Scholten monument after the collision. copyright 2020 Feiko van der Veen

    The Scholten monument in the Stadspark in Groningen was erected in 1931 for industrialist Jan Evert Scholten, as a gift from his friends. Scholten had donated this city park to the city, so that's probably why they considered it a good place for the monument. The Sculptor Abraham Hesselink carved most parts for the monument, which consists of a pedestal with a bust of Scholten on it. This is flanked by two walls on which bronze plaquettes are mounted that refer to horse breeding and trot racing, two of Scholten's favourite pastimes. Next to the pedestal are two children in sportswear and on the corners of the monument the coat-of-arms of Stad en Ommelanden have been placed. It has sat there all this time, decaying a little bit over time, Until on Sunday morning 20 September 2020 a car against crashed into the monument with a huge bang and caught fire. The driver was killed instantly.

    Reconstruction

    The two recovered original statues on the truck. Photo: Henk Tammens

    The monument needd to be restored. The two statues were considerably damaged and after some consultation ended up at Serge's place to be reconstructed and resculpted in French limestone. All loose parts were kept on Serges request, so that he could fit them together and supplement the missing pieces with plaster. After reconstructing the statues, he coloured the plaster with acrylic paint, so that it was almost impossible to see that it was all repairs. He ordered the new stone and asked me if I could cut out the two statues on my copying saw machine. Because this machine is a contour saw machine with a saw blade of 40 cm and therefore cannot copy all all of the details, the sides of the statues would not be properly copied, but that was not a real setback. Serge was enough of a professional to easily take care of that.

    Copying

    I contour sawed the two statues out of a new block of limestone. The horizontal saw blade could not copy the space between the arm and the back side, but most details were neatly cut out. Then Serge came and started carving the first statue, taking it easy, starting on the young male figure first. After Serge needed to pull out, the sculptures sat there for a long time. Eventually we came to a decision, We worked out a fee and I carveded the sculpture for him. The carving job was considerably simplified by the sawing machine, But as you can see, there is still plenty of measuring and carving to do before you can call it a full-fledged copy.

    After that, I copied the girl. They're a couple of two stiff athletes, And especially the girl just stands there as if she is doing shopping instead of throwing hammers. The young man with his peculiar eyes looks a little Indonesian, also because of his build. A typical image of that time, shall we say.

    Gallery

    (Read on below!)

    Serge as a sculptor

    Serge climbing one last time into the construction lift, crutches and all, At Saint John's Cathedral, to see his angels up close. 2022. Photo: Roel van der Aa/BD

    I also collaborated a lot with Serge van Druten after the years that we were employed at the Mooy sculpture firm in Amersfoort together, among other things for the St John's Cathedral in Den Bosch, The Netherlands (statues and angels), the St. Eusebius's Church in Arnhem (the Netherlands) (carving ornaments), the Dom Cathedral in Utrecht (tuffstone crockets and large crockets in basalt lava) and of course a lot for the Utrecht Dom Tower in Utrecht (finials, gargoyles, crockets and ornaments).

    Video portrait of a sculptor

    But Serge also had his own projects, Such as its facade reliefs for the commemoration of the landing of St. Boniface in the Netherlands. If you want to know more about this, I'd especially recommend watching the videos that Hugo Rikken from Fullscreen Film made in Serge's studio. A beautifully recognizable portrait of a craftsman and artist, that can be found on the channel of Fullscreen Film on YouTube, by entering the name of Serge van Druten, or by clicking on this link to go through the entire playlist: Videos about Serge van Druten on YouTube.

    An angel being passed on

    Serge was, as I wrote above, suffering from crumbling back vertebrae even before the Groningen athletes. Because of an operation, he asked me 2022 if I wanted to carve the very last of the five angels he would copy into new stone, so the last one would be finished by me. He had reconstructed this angel with plastiline and I carved it in new stone for him. The committee came to inspect it t my place and everything was to their satisfaction.

    This angel was neo -gothic and date from the 1880. It was carved at the time in Udelfanger sandstone, and the intention was to do it the same way again this time around.. Only at the time they had carved it with the layers upright unfortunately. This means that, just like with Pope Leo and Thomas Aquinas, the layers of the stone are running through the sculpture vertically. This causes the danger that whole slices of stone could come down at once. It was quite a challenge for the restoration team to find a block in the quarry from which 1 entire angel could be made. The layer thickness in the quarry (the bank) averages only about 90 cms wide, and these angels are 125 cms tall. But it worked out just fine!

    Gallery: In Principio Erat Verbum-angel, Den Bosch

    (Read on below!)

    Gallery: Of Serge van Druten, sculptor

  • Scaffolding visit: last time Eusebius Church

    Eusebius, Restoration
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    The last time on the scaffolding

    All joys will eventually come to an end, and so did our work on the Eusebius Church in Arnhem, the Netherlands.. Luckily we had to go there one more time to make some adjustments. There were four connections of flying buttress statues to the church that still needed to be carved to fit at the very end. That means that it all didn't exactly match the old parts, and that we had to adjust the protruding bits. In addition, we had deliberately left parts unfinished in a number of places because we could only properly see on site how it would connect to other parts.. This was about the upper flying buttress statues of arch nr 23, with the Seven Virtues, from arch no. 20, on which a man (or woman?) wcould be seen with a watering can, from arch no. 19, with my Goat nibbling on a crocket, and finally of arch no. 17/18, on which my Two-Headed Eagle defiantly sat wide-legged. The first two were carved and therefore also adjusted by Jelle. The other two were adjusted by Tim and myself.

    Drip ledges

    At the top of each of these four flying buttress statues sat a horizontal ledge. We carved all four of them on the spot, because this gives the contractor's masons more leeway when installing the sculptures. You'll need to adjust it to the inclination and the transverse direction of the arc, to the vertical wall plane of the church and to the right height above the arch. In such a case, every part that is already defined is adding a level of difficulty. That's why it's more convenient to, as I reported in the blog article about the Two-Headed Eagle a while ago,  not to tailor a number of things yet and not to finish carve them until they're on the church. That was also the reason that we, especially on the eagle,, whicho stands on two flying buttresses at the same time, needed to do a lot of work on the spot, but we had already counted on that.

    Eduard van Kuilenburg

    sculptor Eduard van Kuilenburg at work on the Eusebius Church between 1950 and 1960

    The Arch with the Seven Virtues is right next to the Seven Sins. They were also carved in the same style by sculptor Eduard van Kuilenburg. Van Kuilenburg was a passionate sculptor, who put all his passion into this church. He died shortly after completing his work on this church. I recently got his biography, from which it can be concluded that shortly after the war he was severely judged on a choice he made in despair and out of self-preservation. I suspect he repressed his war trauma with sculpting. Sometimes he also climbed over the fence on Saturday to continue working, on his own. Anyway, a piercing story of struggle and suffering, that you can read here (in Dutch only, sorry) by clicking on his photo.

    The Seven Virtues

    The figurines of the group with the seven virtues are again predominantly ladies. We see a woman with a dog (temperantia-temperance, ), a woman with a rooster (justitia-vigilance), a man with a lion (fortitude), a woman with a child and a heart (caritas-love), a man and woman with an anchor (spes-hope), a woman with a cross (fides-faith) and a woman with a lantern and a book (prudentia-wisdom). Van Kuilenburg has played with textures, poses and hairstyles, and though we've sharpened up a bit here and there, we actually mostly copied the sculptures just as they were.

    From the figurines of Spes, Hope, I forgot to take pictures beforehand, so I couldn't dedicate an article to it either. So now you can find it here below. You can also find the couple below, in the gallery.

    Gallery

    Click on a small photo below to open the gallery.

    and on YouTube↑

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