Hi. This is Materially Speaking where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. In this series, we're talking about marble in a community in Northern Italy where artists have been carving marble since Michelangelo first came here 500 years ago to source marble for his Pieta. They come not only to benefit from the range of marble available, but also to work with the exceptionally skilled artisans. We're 30 miles north of Pisa, and 15 miles south of the Marble Mountains of Carrara, sandwiched between sea and pine forests on one side, and olive groves rising up hillsides into the Apuan Alps on the other.
We're near a town called Pietrasanta, nicknamed Little Athens because of its tradition for carving marble. Today, I'm talking with Dutch artist, Eppe De Haan. He works at the famous Sem Studios, but also has his own space in the center of Pietrasanta, a few steps from the piazza. 10 years ago, when I first arrived here, dozens of dust covered sculptors descended on the piazza at lunchtime. Many Studios have moved out of town, and the artists tend to eat a pranzo di livoro, a delicious set lunch for Modest Price, in one of the workers' cafes on the outskirts.
The artists still gather in the piazza after work for an aperitifo and the chance to chat. When I sit in the square, I see the familiar faces of artists weaving through the tourists on their bicycles. I hear animated greetings as an artist returns from Norway, say, or Holland, or the states. And sometimes, I get a glimpse of the great Colombian artist, Botero, making his way up the hillside to his home. As I go down the stone steps into Eppe's studio, I hear Mozart playing.
His work is ranged around him on plinths, including his sculptures of the human body seemingly emerging out of a block of Carrara white marble. Eppe is sitting on a stool, leaning forward, focused intensely, Can I start with you at the beginning? When you you said your siblings were musical, your mother was musical, but you not so much, when did you know you were going to become an artist?
That was basically going up to the attic in our small home in the north of Holland, because my father died before I was born. So my mother remarried after a couple of years to a man who worked on the farm. And with the whole thing came the big trunk, and that was on the attic. And in the trunk were all the things of my father. And you have to create your own identity, because if you're born with a dead father, yeah, and they give me his names, it becomes a little bit of drama, because you're always him.
Yeah. You remind your family of him, and even my mother, I was sort of a remake of him. So that attic came my safe haven, and I already draw when I was very small. So drawing was a kind of escaping reality and creating my own world and identity. And the childhood was a bit of a sad one, and I don't like to talk about it, but, my mother said that, I once came with a totally black painting.
And I was a young kid, maybe 5, 6, and she asked me what it was. It was a bit strange, oh, totally black. And I told her a story about a very happy family. But I said, but why is black? I said, mom, the people closed the curtains. So that was probably my first conceptual art. But it was that sort of thing. You know? Art was always there, and it was always an escape.
Eppe trained in drawing and painting at the Royal Academy of The Hague in Holland and also got a degree in teaching. After that first course in marble sculpting at Campo Daltissimo in the first course in marble sculpting at Campo D'Altissimo near Saraveza, he returned to the area on a teaching scholarship.
I went to Rome and again to Tuscany as a sort of teaching program. So then I came back here, and saw all the studios here, and then I chose studio Leonardo in Queretje. That was a kind of a more formal, more hippie like studio. Because I was not a sculptor, I I was a painter. So going to studio sem or to a famous studio and said, here I am.
I'm going to sculpt here, it didn't work. So there I started, and after a couple of years because I was still teaching, I took a sabbatical and never came back to teaching.
How was your trajectory from that that class you took to the studio you sit in working now? So that's how many years? It's, 20 years?
25 years. It's first of all, you have to to learn the technique because I was an artist, you know, so I had the ideas enough, but I wanted to to transfer the ideas from 2D to 3D. So that was fun in a sense of because in with paintings you have to suggest a lot. Space, forms, depth, and in sculpture you just make it. Yeah. So the themes I had as a painter were also the body. Yeah. Female male. And I made a lot of portraits. So the face also had its importance.
So when you see my work, faces and bodies are still there.
You probably didn't apprentice with anyone, did you? No. No. You just worked with other people and
I just had in, Pacheta. I had this place in a studio. I walked in. I said, can I work here?
Mhmm.
And they didn't ask much.
Do you do your pieces from a sketch, or do you do a clay model first?
No. In the beginning, I just grabbed a piece of marble and did it. Try to find something in it. So it's Staglio de Reta, and it's basically there too. That's, off cuts, yeah, on the wall, the relief.
And there you find your things. And the beginning was a research to find what was in. And now here, in this studio, I make much more first models, clay, plaster, marble. But still, in between, when I see a strange piece of marble in the studio, and I think, shit, I think we have a dialogue here. Yeah? And then you start carving.
So how do you find your marble?
It depends. There's, of course, a lot of marble around. Yeah? So if I I started in a studio where piles of rubbish and marble and whatever, Studio Sem has an enormous collection also of own stones and, for special, commissions, then sometimes you go to the quarries to really look for something special.
And do you do many commissions, or do you tend to do your own?
I I basically get commissions from people who see my work and say I like to have it in a bigger scale. That's the easiest way to get commissions. And there was also once a cruise ship company who asked me to design work for their cruise ship, but it was a bit strange because I have the nudity as a theme in my work. Yeah? And on cruise ships, nudity is not really the thing.
So what did you do? Did you dress them?
I availed the 3 graces. I can show it later. It's a beautiful piece. I am still proud of it, And it's still floating around on the oceans.
So do you work with artisans doing the first rough cut for you now? Yeah.
Mhmm. Lately, yeah.
And how is it?
I had a big commission, you see here the Unitas, that's sculpture. I had people here, they fell in love with it, but they said we we would love to have this put in 2 and a half meters in the gar in our garden. So then you have a very clear commission. You already have a work done, so you give it to the artisans, and they enlarge it for you. And I think they spent a month to rough out a piece, and I still had to work on it for half a year to finish it.
But I'm very particular in finishing, that sometimes take a millimeter or a line, it can take forever.
And is that because, Statuario takes a particular finish? Or
No. It's me. I like to have an eggshell finish, so I don't use machines to polish. So I keep working first with the Martello and finer finer finer, then with the Smarilio, it's a kind of polishing stone, then with the paper. So I've always had, if I give my day and hour to the sculpture, then it's starting to get finished. And the DNR is from the blood because if you polish, your fingers can thin and
Eppe is referring to giving his DNA to the sculpture through his blood. Finishing a work is a detailed and lengthy process, and obviously an emotional stage for most artists. He must be pretty tiring.
The skin. Yeah. Not tiring also. Strangely enough, painful. Yeah. But it's also a mantra. It's sort of a continuous sort of game, and you're off the planet, and you see different surfaces appearing, the lines sharpening, and, there, see here. That it's all depending also on the light. So there are just very little differences in volume, and this is plaster. So if you transfer it to marble and you don't have to basically do the finishing, you're looking for the same subtleties.
And I already know now that here I have a critical point.
What does a critical point mean? I've heard the expression
that straight line and the body. Yeah? So here there's still a point of the straight line, and here starts the body. If I do it wrong, then I have to change the whole line or enter different into the body, so it's an optimum of concentration needed for it.
So forgive my lack of artistic, expression, but it seems to me the bodies are emerging from the blocks. How would you describe obviously, this is a, a documentary people are gonna hear. So can you describe a little
It's it's going in the stone and coming out of the stone at the same time. So you have that duality. Yeah. So I use the stone sort of to dive into, but also to reveal something out of it.
And the something is normally as it is here, a torso, a face, some aspect of the human body. Yeah. And this cube.
Yeah. The cube basically came as a little surprise, because in the beginning, I worked the figure the same way. Male form on one side, the female form on the other side, and in between, I had sometimes squares. And I liked it. It was a contrast between geometrical forms and the the body.
And I was started wondering why I was sort of still attached to those forms, but I think it was my history of a painter with always working in a square. Yeah? So the canvas had a sort of rectangular form anyway, so I needed, probably, that sort of reassuring shape to place my figures in. And there, but you don't there you see the start of in the male torso there. You see a line going up, and on the top the line sticks out a bit. It's not here, it's there.
Oh, yeah.
And that's the start of playing with cubes slightly, and then suddenly it was there once on a moment. I made a wax figure, I had a little wooden block in my hands, and I Oreca, that was mine.
So all of your pieces have that now? Both. So is your signature?
No. It's my signature. Yeah. And it's also a symbol for balance and harmony, and also for the three-dimensional element of of stone.
This series is called soul?
Searching Souls.
Searching Souls. But that was a little time ago, but it continues.
It was Searching Souls was a pillar, basically, with 2 figures. And the beauty of it was the figures sort of are in the stone, getting out of the stone. It was like they gave the stone a soul, so it was like the artist, I was looking for the souls. Was I looking for the people? Were they looking for me? Were they trying to be free? Whatever story you can make up with. But that was searching souls. And here you see basically a sort of repetition of the theme, male, female. What do they represent?
I try to create a harmonious element with both of them. And I think that is also important in a life that you create your own harmony. And I can I find it easier in my work than outside? But here I wanted to have a very simple background and that I like to that's a new development basically.
So this one doesn't have another, facet to it. It's a male torso coming out of the front and at the back, a plain canvas. Plain piece of marble.
Yeah.
Yeah. So this is a model, and from here, what happens?
From here, I, first of all, I like to make a lot of models first, and then I have a preference. Yeah. This is my best model now, and then I go to the studio and look for a piece of marble and ask the studio to rough out the piece, and then I work it myself.
Can I ask you about the music? So when I came in you were listening to Mozart.
The sonata. Yeah. The the music has its own rhythm and its own stories to tell, and it calms me down. I can concentrate good on my work, takes away the edge. Sometimes it's also there are moments in your work there's a bit of stress and tension, and the music sort of helps by losing that tension.
And how long have you been at Studio Sem?
I think, almost 20 years. I still remember Sergio, our artigiano, when I started carving there, he didn't pay any attention to me, didn't even greet me, so there's another one who thinks he's an artist, you know. And then when we talked, he said, 5 years. Yeah. Cinque anni, then we can talk further.
So that and he was right. It took me about, I think, if doing retrospective, 5 years to get all the ins and outs technically. Not the ideas, they were always there. It was beautiful to work in Studio Sem, because the artigiani, when they see that the artist has a drive, works hard, and then they sometimes come up and dip you on the shoulder and see you're doing something that could be done a bit different. And then they no communication in a sense, they took on their shoulders, especially Simone who did that, took my chisel and hammer and showed me how I could do the same thing what I was doing in a better way.
So that was a beautiful experience, and Studio Sam was very helpful in that sense.
What else is it that has created such a community here of artists?
Yeah. It's the the whole package basically. Yeah. You have here the material, you have here the know how, you have The infrastructure gives it all, and you share it with other people who come here, although you should not sort of underestimate that we are little islands and not always easy connect to each other. Yeah.
Well, that's interesting because I I hear a lot of people lamenting that not everybody works in the same area, but I've always thought artists work relatively individually, so I wasn't sure how important it was to be connected to other people in the piazza, or now the studios are moving out a little.
Yeah. It's a life, what you have here. It's not important, but you have to survive. So you create your own life. 1st, you learn a a language again, and it was my 5th language, La Chinquelinga, Arlaterzeta, but okay. When I came here, I thought I come here to learn to carve and not to speak another language or learn another language again. So I refused it.
Of course, you start to count and to know a little bit what the food's names are here. These are things. Yeah. But then slowly, you start and, then you start babbling and you don't like it, and then you study, get a little booklet and,
And what about the nature here? I find the nature inspiring. Is that one of the attractions?
You have your mountains. I love the mountains. Sometimes I go, to make a hike. I go here from here on the center or little paths up to work Capitana Monte, and you have a beautiful view. Even from my apartment I can see the sea and the hill, and there's a lonely tree that I have to greet every morning sticks out of, silhouettes of a hill. My tree.
What do you say to it?
We greet each other, and I started also complains about it because it's an Italian tree. So if I have to complain about Italy, I can also complain to my tree.
Do you speak to him in Dutch or Italian?
Of course I do it, in in his language. But if I'm really have to say something serious, then it will be Dutch. But we were I was always surrounded by the sea. So, the north of Holland, we lived 100 meters away from a dyke. And The Hague is also close to the sea again. So and here, the sea. So the sea is a binding element. And don't put me in Switzerland to live, yeah, in the mountains or in a forest. The sea has to be be seen in a sense. I seldom go to the sea here.
But in the morning when I open the the windows and, how do you call it, then I see to see, and that's enough.
So thanks to Eppe de Haan You can see his work on his website at Eppedehaan.com, and follow him on Instagram, @eppedehaan . For photographs of all the work we discuss, follow our Instagram or see our website, materiallyspeaking.com.