I arrived at my destination on Monday September 19th. It was a rainy arrival but Nick was quite hospitable. He gave me a tour, showed me where I could park my truck temporarily, and invited me over for dinner. His shop amazed me and inside it included an office, a drafting room, a lunch room, a sculpting room, a metal working shop, some storage rooms, and a spacious carving studio. On the wall of his office hung huge collection of literature, clay molds, busts, sample carvings, and a great arsenal of tools, and It appeared like it could have been a library or art museum.
(PICTURES TO COME)
Tuesday morning I woke up got ready for my first day of work and at 8:00A.M. met Nick and my new coworker Michael Romanin in the shop. He showed me the stones that we would be working on; traced a template on one of them; hooked up an air hammer and went right to work. I observed as he masterfully controlled and maneuvered the foreign tool. He demonstrated what I was to do and set me up with a stone of my own. Once he selected a suitable air hammer for he went back to his stone and left me to battle it with this clumsy. for the rest of the day I awkwardly worked the airhammer as best I could and gradually made slow progress.
 |
| Nick working with an air hammer. |
 |
| Some pneumatic air hammers and chisels. |
The pneumatic air hammer has relatively recently been adopted into the trade. It became popular in the late 1880's with introduction of steam powered air compressors. This hand tool can be difficult to master and takes as much or more concentration then the well known mallet and chisel. The benifit of the tool is its ability to remove stone very rapidly. I am still trying to get the hang of air hammers and can tell its going to be a long hard battle. My current incling is to drop this palpating beast of a tool and pick up the much friendly mallet and chiself that I used with Jean.
 |
| Hand chisels and Mallets |
For the next few days I followed Nick's lead staying a few steps behind him in the removal of stone. and could slowly see the forms take shape. While carving we followed the Greek method of carving relief. This included cutting all of the backgrounds back to the desired depth and blocking out the shapes in the foreground.
 |
| Tracing the template |
 |
| Cutting back to desire depth |
 |
| Tracing the second level of carving |
 |
| Cutting second layer back to depth. |
No comments:
Post a Comment