Richard Erdman – The Liveliness of Stone

We are very pleased to be working again with renowned sculptor Richard Erdman. Our first partnership was for our Trousdale project, where his Serenade presides over the entrance.

Our current collaboration is for Wren House, still under construction in the California desert. For this design, it was necessary to gain space while still maintaining a one-story profile, so digging down was the answer. Marc and his team have designed a double-height central glass volume that opens up views throughout the house, while infusing the underground level with varying shafts of light. A large house can “live smaller” by making it possible to see a lot from any one place, vertically as well as horizontally.

The swimming and reflecting pools that were a large part of the design seemed the perfect space for sculpture on water, Marc knew Richard’s work would be the right addition. Indeed, the sculptures can be seen from many vantage points inside and outside.

We had a chance to talk with this thoughtful and supremely skilled artist about his work.

W^R: All of the pieces in the suite are sculpted from white Carrara marble. Can you tell us more about this beautiful substance?

RE: Yes, it comes from Carrara, Italy. From a mountain that is five thousand feet high and it's all a solid marble. I grew up in the marble quarry area in Dorset, Manchester, Vermont where the very first quarry in the United States was opened in 1785. So, marble was infused in my life and in my blood. All five in the suite are related because they're all from the same stone, in fact, from the same core in Carrara. These sculptures come from the same quarry that Michelangelo used for many pieces, the same marble that he was cutting from 550 years ago.

Marble is pure 100% calcareous material. It used to be biological life. The sculpture came from coral and plankton and seashells that were dying and compressed into beds on very shallow continental shelves 250 million years ago. If you go to the Caribbean today, that will be marble 200 million years from now.

A very pure mix of white calcium gets compressed, then it recomposes or metamorphoses into marble, what we call marble, a limestone marble. And it's completely uniform, like a sponge. There are no fractures or cleavages. And so that was life. And now you look at Michelangelo's work or Bernini's or Canova, and I'd like to say mine, it's life reborn. That's the beauty. It was alive. And it speaks to us humans much stronger than any other stone.

W^R: The size and scope and methodology of your work is rare, and you work with a very specialized group of artisans in Carrara.

RE: I do. It started with the large Passage sculpture for PepsiCo back in the 1980s. We started with a 400-ton block of stone. I told the chairman Don Kendall who commissioned the piece, we can do this in four sections all glued together or one giant block, which should be unique to the world. No one ever carved a piece that large.

The beginning, getting the rough block out of the mountain is the quarry worker’s job. And they are specialists, all they do is cut blocks out of the core.

And then from that we put it on a big wire saw that allows us to cut sections around that block to slice off pieces, which 30 years ago we were doing by hand, but now we have these wire diamond saws, like a cheese cutter, this slices off pieces to get close to the model. Then the next set of skills, which again is a different individual, is the rough carving where you start carving with a big saw and a hammer large chunks to get down to the actual form at that point.

Another set of skills is following points on a model, which are reference points that translate from the small model eight times, seven times, five times, whatever your scale is, to the final piece.

W^R: So, you are in Italy for all of this work, many months of the year?

RE: Yes, I am there every two months on average. Our work is done with the skill of many individuals doing all day what they're trained to do and they love to do. So, you become good at orchestrating, delegating, like being a conductor where you have your string section over here, your horn section here, your percussion section there, and so each individual has a specific task. And, particularly with sculptures placed on water, because very few people have the patience or the determination and the wherewithal to stay with a project as long as this takes.

I have many projects going at once, which keeps your sanity and your creative juices going. You can't just start one project and finish it, because you'd be doing, you know, two a year. But yes, there are robots that carve stone now in order to get the math, many artists use them. At the shows you see a lot of computer-generated stone pieces. They're not, you would say, fluid or emotional.

W^R: Do you initially draw your designs and then move to three-dimensional material?

RE: Mainly my sketching is bending wire. I take pieces of wire and kind of sketch in space. I glue them together and twist them and then start laying on plaster, adding dimension. They become weightier with plaster and then become sculpture.

So, it's my own sort of technique. I start with a smaller one, maybe like ten inches tall and then make a bigger one that's a couple feet high. These models, called maquettes, I actually cast in bronze and do a small edition of seven to nine. They're all small editions.

And then these become the model, depending on how large you execute. If you enlarge your sculpture to anything more than a scale of four or five times, then you need to create a larger working model because translating from one to ten, that's a big jump.

W^R: Your clients see the smaller maquette and then renderings of the sculpture?

RE: Oh yes, my maquettes are everything. When I do new projects, we photograph the maquettes in their space and send a beautiful rendering to say this is what I want to make, and this is what it looks like. And they have to trust that it's going to translate into marble.

W^R: Would you talk about each of the works at Wren House? The largest is at the entrance.

RE: Yes, the Arete sculpture is the least organic of this suite of sculptures for the Wren project.

It is a tall kind of architectural piece which I selected to be in the front of the house as we go into the setting. I wanted something really strong and vertical along with the tall columns that Marc designed for the front, and I wanted a piece to reflect that strength and reflect the owners. First thing you see is, wow, these are bold, excitable people who are muscular and moving all the time.

That sort of sets the mood and it's like a flagpole at the entrance, and also because that piece is not as organically fluid as the others it needed to be separate, you couldn't really put that within view of the others and have it merge as well. It stands on its own, but it's part of the family.

W^R: The three in a group together on the reflecting pool, and near the fire element have such graceful energy, they move!

RE: I like to call it a beautiful conundrum, you know, getting this movement in it, right? Something that has beauty, but it also has contrast and diversity.

There's no symmetry in anything I do. It's all asymmetrical, but yet they're all symmetrical in feeling. And that’s the dynamic of the opposites of nature that I play with and have been in love with since I was a boy.

So, those three, the trio of Aurora, Odyssey, and Aria each in their own way, embody fluidity, constant motion, recirculation–the qualities that define water in its purest form. Aurora is the softest and most flowing in form. Aurora is kind of like his name, sort of like a halo around you. It has this organic angel-like feel. The names are very subtle, sort of poetic titles that are meant to draw you into a thought, but not be literal.

W^R: Aria certainly seems to echo the flames of our fire feature.

RE: Aria mimics the flickering, hypnotic quality of flame but also captures the fluid movement of the water. And Odyssey, as the name implies, is an exuberant expression of the ideas of risk, adventure, and pride, that sort of feeling.

W^R: And then Spira is set apart in the pool facing the view at the back of the house.

RE: Yes, on the other side of the property there is an expansive view, and lots of water, both swimming pools and reflecting pools. These demanded a large sculpture obviously, and with the mountains in the background and the lightness of the water and Marc’s use of glass, the building, which is like a spaceship practically floating away... I wanted to be sure the sculpture had that lightness as well.

You wouldn't want to think heavy. And so Spira really fits the bill and the essence of that sculpture of course, like water itself, it's flowing stone in water form. It has the same fluidity as a fountain. And what I love playing with, and these are odes to my mentors back in the early days, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, is playing with spatial relationships and the solidity of the piece.

W^R: One of the things that Marc learned on a project years ago was the idea of a large house living small. The idea of being able to see at least two other spaces while you're in one, so you can reference where you've been or where you're going, and what somebody else is doing in their space. The pieces are visible from a lot of vantage points.

RE: Everywhere you go. Yes, different angles. And they speak to you differently, particularly the big one outside. You can walk from one end of the house to the other and Spira out in the pool will be like the moon. It'll always be up in the sky as you move across the house.

You can be downstairs and you look through the area where the glass pool bridge is and you'll see that piece up against the sky. So, when you look at the symphony of the suite of expressions you'll probably be able to see them from almost every place, not the front one, but the other four will be seen from every part of the house.

To have an opportunity with Marc to put these pieces on water, from which they came, is kind of the ultimate. They've arisen… kind of life springing is what you feel from these, even though I take it literally and clients may not, that's part of the subtlety of this project.

So, we, myself and the clients, couldn't be happier with the continuation of the water throughout the whole theme.

W^R: The dynamic between the architect, the clients and you, the artist, what does that collaboration feel like?

RE: It becomes meaningful. It really does. And I know we've added meaning to both the client's lives tremendously. And Marc's project has added meaning to my sculpture. There's just such a synergy here. This is something that Marc can be really proud of. Also, all the sculptures sit on one point of contact and have a rotating plate of stainless steel, so you can turn them. It takes two people, but it turns very nicely. So, the owners can change the position one week or the next, change the lighting. It really makes it interactive and when you can turn a sculpture, you are just drawn to it.

The clients are going to have this glass palace with these sculptures that are always in a slow vibration of time that never stop pleasing you. And they can be touched and loved and turned, the owners are the lucky winners. We're just putting the parts together, you know.

W^R: Stone is definitely not cold for you, it is full of emotion.

RE: For me, and then I hope for the owners, you become part of it and it's no longer an inanimate object. It is very avid, part of your family. I wish you could do that with a painting. You can't really react to a painting physically. I'm sort of pushing with everything I do the idea that the more senses you can engage, the more feeling and sensitivity you have, the more you feel alive. And you know that from being out on the snow for example. You can draw many examples from hiking up a mountain, to being in a sauna, or skiing. When you're engaged in sight, sound, touch, and motion, you're just so electric and alive, time really slows down. And that's the whole point of the sculptures.

W^R: And, of course, the foundation in many ways, of all of these pieces is the white Carrara marble. The history in the stone.

RE: I live in geology because I carve material that is 200 plus million years old. You know, I do some granite pieces. It's even older, up to a billion years old. It's blue granite I use, it's formed in Brazil, almost a billion years old, it's full of diamonds, basically. That sort of humbles you and you realize how brief a time we have, so why not be the best you can be and take every moment for what it's worth. That attitude is what I'm presenting in these works.

W^R: As Marc is all about light in his designs, he must appreciate how your pieces relate to different angles of light and how different times of day that's going to express itself. That light meeting motion in stone is really a marriage between the two of you.

RE: Yeah, you know, his love of light is everything. I mean, everything he does is about the light, isn't it? I’ve looked at all his work and of course we've worked together now on two projects and it's brilliant. It is modernism taken to the next level, right? It's remarkable how he creates structure and comfort at the same time, it’s as if you don't have anything around you. In fact, his work is kind of like a layer of geology. The planes are all there. You feel them, you see them, but you don't feel bound or restricted by them. He thinks about light in so many ways, doesn't he? The sky bridges? I mean, can you imagine that being a solid bridge once you see it in glass? And then this project, having that pool, the bridge, and the swimming areas? It's like being in space, I suppose.

W^R: The human interaction possible with the pieces, visually and tactilely, will bring a lot of joy.

RE: Well, thanks. That's my main sort of focus because I just love the beauty of life. And I've been lucky from boyhood on to be attached and aware of the temporality of life. And, that's from growing up in strong nature. In Vermont we have four really strong seasons and you just get into one, then it's over and then, there's another beginning. But that teaches the cycles of life, as it happens over and over, and how brief it is. You see the leaves die every year and burn up and where do they go?

And so, when you start thinking about life that way as a young artist, it really sets your precedent. That's what these sculptures do, they're meant to freeze the beauty of time that we cannot freeze. But these sculptures, whoever lives with them, has the joy of looking at these pieces and feeling that somehow my thought, my beauty, and my point of being is sort of transferred into this sculpture. And that's hopefully the dialogue between the sculpture and the human. So that's really the perpetual nature of these pieces and how could it be better spoken than in stone, right?

W^R: That’s a perfect place to end our conversation.