Limestone sculptors share their skills at Indiana symposium

ELLETTSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - John Fisher believes he’s got it figured out. The painter-turned-stone sculptor works by looking behind the chisel, seeing the line in a profile, then sculpting and blasting the stone waste in chunks the size of his hands. He draws a line on the back of a limestone woman and takes chunks out of her side to illustrate how her ribs would realistically rotate.

“I feel that this technique that I use was a technique that must have been used for millennia,” Fisher said. “I had seen books from the Renaissance that show the tools, but not a word is written about how to use them. I think it was common knowledge. But then, that knowledge was lost.”

For the past two weeks, Fisher has been a visiting instructor for the Indiana Limestone Symposium in Ellettsville. He enlightens the artists in attendance - from beginners to professional sculptors - to steer clear of what many have been taught about looking in front of the chisel, rather than behind it. Fisher wants the carvers to pay attention to the stone they are leaving instead of focusing their eyes on the stone they are chipping away.

“Most of the people, when I come here, they are all carving wrong,” he said. “They think it’s easier, but they also can’t see what they are doing, and they are showering themselves with stone all day long, and they don’t stop for a minute to think that nobody ever used to carve like that and there might’ve been a reason, besides eye protection.”

Fisher admits he cannot confirm that great sculptors such as Michelangelo used this technique, but he just can’t think of any other way Michelangelo could have hand-carved the David in two years.

“It got lost because they stopped teaching it, and when people went to college at the turn of the century, figurative art was out of style and abstract was in, and very, very quickly, knowledge gets lost and newcomers come in and they didn’t know any better,” he said.

For Amy Brier, a professional sculptor and the symposium co-founder and president, Fisher’s technique takes all the fuss away.

“I met him three or four years ago, and I’ve learned so much from him, and he’s just a huge asset here,” she said. “(With his method), you get a block and you take off 30 percent. You create some movement, abstract shapes and curves, and then you sit back and look at it like a cloud and find a form in it, and the carver can choose what they choose to find, and they go for it.”

Brier said what used to take her days to accomplish in a piece now takes only 20 minutes.

Cutting away 30 percent of a block of limestone and then imagining it as a cloud, looking for what it is to become, is a personal experience.

For Fisher, it creates an intimate and authentic piece, combining the abstract thought of creating something original but using the techniques of Renaissance masters.

He has created 450 pieces using this technique, chipping away at marble and limestone. He travels around the world, carving and teaching his rediscovered method.

For one piece, he collaborated with Brier and sculptor Sharon Fullingim to create a memorial for the quarrymen of southern Indiana, with hopes of placing it somewhere in the Bloomington community. The limestone piece still has the cuts and jags where it was cut from a quarry, and carved in the porous stone are cutters depicted with their lifting hooks, holding the stone as they cut.

“It’s like a dance, all these hands and minds working together,” Fisher said. “We bring everything together and create this beautiful piece.”

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Source: The (Bloomington) Herald Times, https://bit.ly/2sF5RPi

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Information from: The Herald Times, https://www.heraldtimesonline.com