I'm always wanting my pieces to be not just sculptures, but but living creatures or living personalities in the sense that you feel the life of each person or animal. I work on things, but I work on many things at the same time. And more often than not, I put something aside and and work on something else. So things can be sitting around for years and years before they're finally finished. I don't find myself limited by the preciousness of white marble as a lot of people are here.
Neal Barab:Usually, when I'm at this stage of a kind of raw figure without any added color in it, a 100% of the people who who see it tell me, stop there. It's good enough. You don't need color. Absolutely everyone. No one ever says, yeah, add some color.
Neal Barab:But, again, 90% of the people after I do add color say, oh, you did a good job. Good for you. I like the idea of games and joking and kind of doing things unexpected, like you don't expect a sculpture to also be a ping pong table. It's not like I'm trying to make a joke, but they always end up a little bit humorous. And and that's not that I'm trying to make it humorous, but I'm trying to create a character. And my characters, they're not dying and fighting. They're they're standing and and reacting with with the viewer. So I keep working on something until until it comes alive. And comes alive in my mind is that these figures have a life of their own.
Sarah Monk:Hi. This is Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. We're 30 miles north of Pisa and 15 miles south of the Marble Mountains Of Carrara, near a town called Pie nicknamed Little Athens because of its tradition for carving marble.
Sarah Monk:Today, I'm with Neal Barab, a Californian artist who, together with two partners, set up Studio Pescarella in an old marble saw yard. As I try to park without blocking lorries from entering the adjacent marble factory, I almost run over a noisy chicken coop.
Sarah Monk:Pescarella has an enormous yard dotted with the equipment they share. Trucks with a long arm and sling to lift the stone, trolleys to move it around, compressors to power the tools and blow off the dust. Around the huge industrial building are outdoor workspaces with three sides of corrugated iron and a roof. I love the old wooden cavaletti or little horses on which the artists place their sculptures to work them. The older the cavaletti, the more they are scarred by cuts.
Sarah Monk:Inside the building, high windows throw light down on Neal's space, packed with his personaggi or characters carved from brightly colored stone, some of them also painted. They're already on plinths for his exhibition in a few days.
Neal Barab:My name is Neal Barab. I come from California. I grew up in Los Angeles and then went to school and lived in Santa Cruz before coming here. So that's just South Of San Francisco. My work is variously influenced by Mexican pre Columbian art, art from the Cyclades, African art, and then into animation, especially Japanese anime, Miyazaki, Totoro, even cartoons and and popular films.
Neal Barab:Now I'm preparing for a show in Pietrasanta where I've lived and worked for more than thirty years. Recently, I did something for the city of Pietrasanta. When you do something on the streets or or roundabouts of Pietrasanta becomes included in what they call the il Parco Internazionale della Scultura Contemporanea, or something like that, the International Contemporary Sculpture Park. It's nice to do a show in Pietrasanta. Though I've been here all this time, I haven't done a a personal show here. So it's good to let people see what I'm doing.
Neal Barab:I feel like right now I'm into something that's really personal and I'm really having fun with it. I'm I'm in this period of work where it just flows. I'm working on this series. I call it Personaggi or personalities, characters.
Neal Barab:And they're persons or animals made up of different kinds of marble and different colors of marble. And often, I'll add paint to it also. Around the world, when you encounter Carrara marble, it's prestigious. The Carrara marble is the white marble that comes from here. It's the reason why we're all here.
Neal Barab:When you get here, you discover there's Carrara marble and then there's Carrara marble. The marble that's mostly known around the world here, they say it's ordinario, ordinary marble. And what's really precious is statuario, which is more white and more translucent. And, of course, the Carrara marble sets the norm for the best quality marble because it has very small crystals that are hard enough to hold an edge but not too hard to work. What I appreciate about being here is the other marble that's imported from all over the world.
Neal Barab:I'm able to use pink Portuguese marble, green verde ming, a black fossil stone from Morocco from the Atlas Mountains, which is black with white fossils flowing through, which kinda looks like a night sky with comets shooting through the the sky. Various kinds of travertine marble. Travertine means it has holes in it, starting with Roman travertine, which a lot of the Colosseum was made of in Rome, and going on to Travertino Noce, which is kind of brown. I have a pinkish Russian travertine. I have a yellow Persian travertine.
Neal Barab:And then there's a quarry not far south of Sienna that has a lot of travertine of different colors that I've started exploring. So I'm putting different stones together, different degrees of polish, maybe some parts of it might be high polished, not too much though, just to give highlights. Other parts have contrasting textures. With the travertine, I often spray paint the entire travertine form and then sand it down again, leaving color in the in the holes of the travertine.
Neal Barab:In Los Angeles and California, I guess you could say I was influenced by the Bay Area funk movement, which was going on at the same time just as pop and beyond, even when a lot of minimalism was going in, there was a lot of kind of humorous painterly sculptural work going on.
Neal Barab:Robert Arneson, if you knew him, did a famous portrait of George Moscone after Moscone was assassinated with Harvey Milk in in city hall, and the city didn't accept his sculpture because it wasn't heroic enough of a monument. It was a bit sarcastic. And so if you had to look for where my work comes from, it's a combination of that California funk, general California aesthetic, possibly animation, and pre Columbian and Aboriginal art.
Sarah Monk:So did you have a formal art training?
Neal Barab:In the American sense, which was very informal. The American bachelor's degree is a four year degree, but at least two years of it are spent studying general subjects. So I had never meant to be an artist. I kind of fell into it. It's interesting, John Greer wrote an essay for me for the last show I had at Kunst Fabrik Gross Zigghartz in Austria.
Neal Barab:And as we discussed my upbringing, he hit on something that I hadn't thought of that affects my work, which is that my father worked for Mattel Toy Company. And in fact, we moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1960 because he got this job with Mattel, nineteen fifty nine, actually. In fact, you can see my father on the British show, The 100 Best Toys that comes on Christmas every year, as he talks about the formation of Barbie because he was in on that at the beginning. So we, as kids, we used to go into the testing room, which would be a mirrored room that they would watch us choosing which toys to play with. We would go into a room full of toys and play with certain things.
Neal Barab:And the family lore is that we always played with the wrong toys. They would have these new things that they hoped would be popular. And so you bring a kid in and see what going on.
Sarah Monk:Who's your favorite?
Neal Barab:You know they had a lot of toys then which wouldn't be allowed now for safety reasons. I remember there was a what was it called? There was one where you kind of poured this liquid goop into molds, and then you had a little machine that heated it up, and then they would be kind of hard rubber. That was a favorite. There's another one called Vacuform, where you kinda take a sheet of plastic, and it melts over a form, and then you cut it out. Those were those were some of the ones I remember.
Neal Barab:I went back the first time in Santa Cruz, and I started studying politics having already been involved in some politics, some electoral campaigns in in California, Tom Hayden for senate. Tom was married to Jane Fonda. He had been one of the major antiwar organizers, founder of SDS. I think he was the first big name from the radical sixties to try and get elected. He didn't get elected, but it was a good campaign.
Neal Barab:That led me into the United Farm Workers where Cesar Chavez was the leader, and I worked for months on electoral campaign in California. So then by the time I got to Santa Cruz, I thought, well, I'll study politics. At least that's when you do something. But politics on an academic level doesn't really do anything either.
Neal Barab:They're they're still talking about after the revolution, this is what our perfect state will look like. And so I again got disillusioned, dropped out of that, worked for a few years, and then just thought I'd go back to university just because they had a foundry class, a bronze foundry class, and a welded sculpture class. So I thought I'd learn how to weld, make some sculpture, take the bronze class. I was obviously interested, but I don't know where that interest came from. I wasn't thinking about being an artist, but I took these classes and never really left the classroom. I was always in the studio late at night. Even then, if you look back on who was in the studio in the after hours, those are the people who are still artists now.
Neal Barab:I did a commission for the city of Santa Cruz, which is still there. They put it on a kind of back street because they didn't want it on the main street, but it turned out they built the art museum right in front of the sculpture. So I ended up with a sculpture that was in front of the local art museum and which survived a big earthquake in 1989.
Neal Barab:The building behind it kind of completely crumbled, but my sculpture's still standing there pristine because I know that when you have a public sculpture, you've got to design it for a gang of feral youths trying to pull it down. So I designed it for that, and it's still there.
Neal Barab:It was five years after I graduated, I decided to go to Pietrasanta, which I had heard about from one of my professors, Jack Zajac, who had been in Italy since 1948 where he won the Prix de Rome for painting and ended up being more known for his sculptures and working in Pietrasanta. So he sent me here with a list of people I could look up, one of whom was, Yvonne Davidson. Yvonne was a local woman who married an American soldier from the war. And the soldiers who passed through here in the summer and winter of nineteen forty four were were first black soldiers, a a segregated black regiment, and then the Japanese American Nisi soldiers.
Neal Barab:Yvonne married Frank Davidson, who was an officer in in the black regiment, and ended up coming back to Pietrasanta, where Frank was always known as the American guy. So Yvonne became kind of a liaison between the foreign sculptor community and the local community because she spoke English. She would help people find places to live and interpret and things. So when I when I walked into town and and knocked on Yvonne's door, she thought a little bit balcony and pointed up the mountain and said, you see that little castle there? Would you like to live there? And I said, yeah. I think I would. And and it turns out that she was friends of the old aristocracy of Pietrasanta who owned still the Little Fortino, the little fort in the middle of the wall that surrounds Pietrasanta. So I lived there for my first two years, which was quite amazing because it was made as a watchtower.
Neal Barab:So it had a view up and down the coast and looked straight down into the Piazza Of Pietrasanta, where we know that Michelangelo had lived for two years when he was quarrying marble for the Medici. So I always had a sense that at some point, he would have walked up the hill to get a view out my bedroom window. So I always had this sense that Michelangelo had been there looking out the window probably with a glass of wine in his hand just like I did every day after work.
Sarah Monk:What is it about the area that makes it you know, you came because somebody told you should come. What what did you find when you got here ?
Neal Barab:The cliche is that it's sculptor's paradise, but it's actually true. You don't have the distractions that one normally has when you have your studio near your home. You come here and you actually do nothing but carve marble. Your production level rises exponentially. Everything is easy here for for a marble sculptor.
Neal Barab:The stone is is easily available. Here, there's a rule that you never work on bad stone. So if there's a crack in it or or it's just not good quality, you just don't work on it because there's always better stone around for a good price. You also are able to take risks when you're making sculpture because if it breaks or if it doesn't work out, then you put it aside and start something else. And the freedom to do that helps your work.
Neal Barab:In Pietrasanta itself, even in the winter, there's probably hundreds of sculptors living here, and over the course of the year, I'd say thousands of stone sculptors pass through town. So when you meet people, generally they're a stone sculptor. The community is already here. Although we're ageing our community, we're all well past 50 now, and there's not as many youth. Now you don't really see young people coming here from the art.
Sarah Monk:Why is that?
Neal Barab:I believe because it's too expensive, but it's also has to do with how the nature of contemporary art has changed because we're, by definition, object makers, and and contemporary art now is very much more situational, site specific, and conceptual.
Sarah Monk:So shall we talk a little about Pescarella while we're waiting for the others?
Neal Barab:Yeah. Well, Pescarella started in 2002 when Jaya Schuerch, Lotte Thuenker and I, we ended up here. We bought the space and invested in setting it up. But with the idea of having enough people working that it would just keep the place going, we're not making a profit on it, but we keep it going. Each sculptor has their own space, and we have some indoor space for exhibiting our work.
Neal Barab:Being that Jaya is half Swiss and Lotte is German, we're very well organized. We made sure we had showers, a changing room, a kitchen that works. We're kind of very strict with how you behave. Everything's got to be cleaned up. It's important that people don't bother us when we're working. We're sculptors first, and we give the space. And if you can't work by yourself with your own tools, then this isn't the place for you.
Neal Barab:As as Pietrasanta has gotten more popular, it's the standard gentrification thing that goes on around the world. The artists are there, so people move in, so the artists have to move out. We're still in the Commune Of Pietrasanta but we're out in an industrial area where we don't bother anyone.
Neal Barab:We welcome sculptures. People find us and hear about us. We're usually willing to allow people we don't know come in and work.
Sarah Monk:And what's the language spoken here?
Neal Barab:What we have here is is one Italian, Sauro Lorenzoni, who who is a retired artigiano. Sauro worked for the Henraux Company, which was the the first major studio to invite modern sculptures in. So Sauro, as a youth, worked for Henry Moore and Marino Marini and and a lot of people. And being around 80 now, he has a lot of history and technique behind him. So with Sauro, we speak Italian.
Neal Barab:With our Korean member, Kim Sung II we speak Italian. Everybody else speaks English, or there's a lot of German or Swiss people. Christine's from France. So across the lunch table, there's quite often three languages.
Sarah Monk:And do you eat together every day?
Neal Barab:We do. We shut the machines down from 12:30 to 01:30, and we eat together. And even now, people know in town that we always have lunch at that time, and they're always welcome to stop by and have lunch with us. So we do get a lot of guests at lunchtime.
Sarah Monk:Great. Well, maybe we should go at this point.
Neal Barab:So do you guys introduce yourselves to
Sarah Monk:I'm Sarah. Hi.
Simone:I'm Simone.
Michael:Michael.
Sarah Monk:Hi, Michael. So do you work here part all year round, half of the year?
Simone:No. I'm here for two months. First time.
Sarah Monk:How is it?
Simone:It's fantastic. It's fantastic. I'm a I live in New Zealand, we don't have any marble there. For me here, it's like paradise, having all that choice, all those colors, and
Sarah Monk:It's like a sweetie shop.
Simone:Oh, yeah. Kind of.
Sarah Monk:Gosh That smells good.
Neal Barab:I'll cut up the pie.
Sarah Monk:So do you have a recipe for your crostata or
Neal Barab:No, but I'm always criticizing Douglas about his crust, so we'll see whether I did it.
Sarah Monk:Should I get coffee, or do we have it after?
Neal Barab:Pour the coffee. Douglas, you're late. Hi. Have you eaten lunch? Good. There you go. There's lunch.
Douglas Robinson:Great. I was just caught up in my work. I didn't know what time it was.
Neal Barab:Christina. Ciao. Ciao.
Neal Barab:This is Sarah. Hi. Yeah. Christine. Hi. There's enough food for you if you like.
Christine Madies:Oh, thank you.
Neal Barab:We're having dessert.
Christine Madies:Can I take this place?
Sarah Monk:Oh, dear. You've got bandages.
Douglas Robinson:Oh, it's just protection.
Sarah Monk:Pastry is very good.
Neal Barab:I was telling...
Sarah Monk:Not saying anything bad about yours, Douglas.
Neal Barab:See, you need to read. You need to... did I give you a 'The 'joy of cooking'?
Douglas Robinson:I never read.
Neal Barab:You need to read about
Douglas Robinson:That's why I can't That's why
Neal Barab:No. In joy of cooking, they have two pages about pastry crust, and you need to read that.
Douglas Robinson:I've read it. Years ago.
Neal Barab:No. No. Oh,
Christine Madies:You're worse than the married couple!
Sarah Monk:I was gonna say that. That's true.
Sarah Monk:So that was pre protection against an accident, not that you've had an accident.
Douglas Robinson:No. I instead of wearing a glove, just to protect my knuckles.
Sarah Monk:Sure.
Douglas Robinson:I'm banging them all morning, by the Because actually no. Because they bleed. If they bleed on this stone, if I don't see that blood, it'll sink in the white stone, and it won't come out.
Christine Madies:Well, but then people might be very touched.
Neal Barab:So that's why
Christine Madies:they would see
Neal Barab:Maybe you will. Bled for the sculpture. Yes. I know.
Christine Madies:Every piece of work has is made with blood, sweat and tears.
Neal Barab:You could add pee because if you have a big sculpture, most guys pee on the sculpture
Sarah Monk:They do not!
Neal Barab:Probably didn't hear Michael talk much, but he's a Brit.
Sarah Monk:Oh you're British,so where are you from?
Speaker 9:Lincoln. First time over here in It's coming to the end of three months here.
Sarah Monk:How's it been?
Speaker 9:I've really loved it.
Sarah Monk:What you do at home?
Speaker 9:I do sculpture full time there. I worked on Lincoln Cathedral as a stone carver for fifteen years.
Sarah Monk:And what are doing here? You're doing your own creative?
Speaker 9:Yeah. My own sculptural stuff. In marble?
Sarah Monk:In marble?
Speaker 9:Yeah. That was the main reason for coming out, to try the marble and really experiment with it.
Sarah Monk:Is it your first time working in marble?
Speaker 9:I've worked marble back in The UK, stuff that I've imported, but I've always been very careful with it and very timid with it because it's a precious material in The UK. It's not something you find. So coming out here was a chance just to have a really good go at marble and see what I could do with it, see what the material could do.
Neal Barab:It's interesting for us watching Michael because most of us are self taught. We learned here and there, and so I saw Michael doing things with the machine, which were beyond the point where I usually say you have to leave the machine and do it by hand if you wanna get a a good organic curve, for instance. But he's skilled enough to be able to do it with the machine. So Jaya and I have both come over to get private lessons on how exactly do you get so so far with the machine.
Sarah Monk:That's really interesting. How long are you staying?
Speaker 9:Till the end of the month.
Sarah Monk:Okay. One more week to go.
Sarah Monk:One more week?
Michael:Yeah.
Sarah Monk:In time for Neal's show.
Sarah Monk:Hi. So we're in your show. How did you choose this place?
Neal Barab:This is Sala de Grasce, g r a s c e. It's a place where a lot of the artists in the community show. It's part of the cultural center in the center of town. I'd say most of the artists in town end up showing here. It's a nice space. It's all rustico stone walls where the sculptures fit in here, quite nicely.
Sarah Monk:Yeah. It's a bit like a cellar, isn't it, really? It's sort of got a
Neal Barab:Or a cave or a cellar. I'm showing 15 pieces. I was quite attentive to show less, to see more. I think that each piece needs its own space.
Sarah Monk:Douglas actually pointed out that it works well having these two pieces right where you come in.
Neal Barab:These two pieces are the heaviest pieces, so I didn't wanna move them around, but I did have the sense that that's where they should go right at the beginning.
Neal Barab:Though they're already the biggest pieces, they're also unfinished. What we have are these yellow travertine heads with pink Russian travertine torsos, male and female. They're about a meter high each now, maybe a little less. In the end, they're gonna be more than three meters high, and they'll be quite a domineering pair of perhaps guardian figures, entrance figures.
Neal Barab:Most of the ones that are are human 'ish, I want to be somewhere around our own, the viewer's eye level. There is a definite optimal height for everything, especially the dogs, big dog and little dog. I had always had on the ground feeling that they had more of a real life if they were in a real space. But now I've put them up about two feet, 40 centimeters on a piece of, white marble, and they're actually better like that. When I put the animals up high, they become sculptures at eye level. So you're looking into the dog's eyes, and and the big dog, you're looking right through the the hollow snout, which you otherwise wouldn't notice. And it also gives a positive aspect of bringing the smaller dog up a little closer to the viewer's eyesight and and being a little more intimate.
Sarah Monk:I think it certainly looks like a family. I feel at night they certainly get off those things and, you know, party.
Neal Barab:Yeah. They do look as though they do. Yeah.
Sarah Monk:Can you describe, because it's aural project, some of the figures
Neal Barab:Yeah. They got names? Big dog and little dog are marble and olive wood, and the olive wood is taken from my own olive trees. I have 40 olive trees on a terraced hillside just few kilometers from my studio. And when I'm doing what's called the potatura or cutting the trees lower every couple years, I'm always looking for bits that might end up being part of an interesting sculpture.
Neal Barab:If we go on to this other piece here, which I call trav femme because it's a female travertine form.
Sarah Monk:It's beautiful.
Neal Barab:The hair is made out of all these crystals. If you imagine an underground cave with crystal formations, stalagmites, that's kind of what is happening in this stone. I just kind of saw this block in a stone yard one day, and in the middle of this cut block of yellow travertine was a big hole. And in this hole were a lot of these crystal formations.
Neal Barab:What we're looking at now is a head that's maybe 10 kilos, but I probably bought two tons of stone. So this has yellow travertine. It has Roman travertine as a kind of scarf floating in the wind, and it has a red Persian travertine as a torso, and it doesn't really need more color. Although, if you look very closely up in the hair, I did paint some red into the holes of the hair.
Neal Barab:So here I have a marble ping pong table. I've done three of them. The first one was done out of one piece. I showed it in Firenze in 2007, Florence. This one here is made out of four pieces of marble, the net being a piece of yellow marble, the top being a piece of kind of olive colored verde ming from China, the middle being what we call leopard stone, which is actually a marble that comes from Marmora in near Istanbul. Marmora, of course, being the Turkish word for marble.
Neal Barab:So I this this leopard stone is quite an interesting stone that I use a lot because it works really good with abstract form. Instead of the usual veins of marble going through the stone, it has tubes of pigment running through the stone. So if you cut it a certain way, it's spotted. And if you cut it another way, it's striped.
Neal Barab:So anyway, the middle bit here of this ping pong table is leopard stone. The bottom is pink Portuguese. There's a lot of pink Portuguese marble around here. It runs from very light, almost white to very deep rose red. And in the area here, I was able to wander around hundreds of stone yards between here and Carrara until I find just the dark block that I needed for the stone.
Neal Barab:So the thing about the ping pong table is that it's small. It's it's about a quarter of the size of a real ping pong table. But the reality is that you can really play ping pong on it. Once you get the measure of it, a good ping pong player, it takes about three minutes, and then they stop hitting it hard, and you realize you have to hit it on the table. You can still hit it hard, but you have to aim down. So once you're playing, you can get a really good volley going. And what you realize is that ping pong is much better played on stone than it is on the usual plywood. It has a beautiful bounce to it. Much nicer than than it would be on wood.
Sarah Monk:Are you good? Do you win? Being my table, I have the home court advantage. If you look at the piece outside, I've made this piece with different travertine. It's an upside down figure, so at a little more than a meter high, you have this pair of boots, which are in what we call travertino noce or nut colored travertine. Below that, legs and hips in Russian travertine, which is a pink stone. And then below that, I have a a belt of Persian travertine. And below that, I have some yellow travertine, which is a kinda torso, and it's kinda standing on its head.
Neal Barab:Sometimes we get lost in in the technical and the the different kinds of marble, but what that allows me to do is to choose among all these different colors and textures and abilities of the different stone to invoke different vocabularies and meanings.
Neal Barab:What happens with stone is that you kind of fall in love with the material. In fact, if you don't fall in love with it, then you don't keep doing it. But most of us, we have a real visceral love affair with stone, and so that's that's the beginning of it And then we develop our own artistic aesthetic and and sentiments from the material.
Sarah Monk:So thanks to Neal Barab. You can see his work on his website at nealbarab.art, and follow him on Instagram, Neal Barab. For photographs of all the work discussed in this series, follow our Instagram or visit our website, materiallyspeaking.com, where you can join our mailing list to hear about upcoming episodes. Editorial thanks to Guy Dowsett.