Modern Day Renaissance Sculptor: Andreas von Huene

Today I have in the studio with me artist Andreas f Huna. Nice to see you today. My pleasure. Nice to see you too. And it's a, it's a lovely musical name for a very kind of musically oriented, at least in the family individual. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yes. You have not only a strong visual art background, but also you have a whole musical art background coming from your father And my mother. And your mother. Well, tell me about that. She, uh, got her diploma in library science in Germany in Frankfurt, bombed out in Frankfurt, Germany. And it goes something like diploma bi fitting, Hoen and Deanston on, which means higher level services, scientific libraries or something like this. And it abbreviates to dip bile, but she can read voraciously and cite, read voraciously. While I'm trying to applaud my way through a little Bach prelude. She has to jump in on the piano and play the whole thing at proper tempo. That's amazing. And she plays viola Deba, viola, violin recorder, um, hark, piano, all these things. So she's got the fast nerves to do that sort of thing. And your father makes instruments? Yes. My father made renaissance and broker quarters and flutes and some other interesting things. So researching original instruments in museums around the world, reproducing them, and then also adapting them to modern pitch. So we typically make instruments either in a four 40 modern pitch or a four 15 old pitch we call it. And everybody wants to push pitches around for their own personal feelings. We'll do a little plea for standardization. So how did this translate into your interest in art and in sculpture? Well, my parents, when we were little, I'm one of five when we were little, my parents couldn't afford babysitters very often. So we would be taken along to the concerts they would give to the camara and other organizations in the Boston area to the Museum of Fine Arts. In the evenings. The concerts was usually in a room called the Goba Lab because they had these go tapestries. Now I realize the room is clad in Tennessee, pink marble, so very live renaissance type acoustics. We got to know the music pretty well as kids and would fidget. So these docents would take pity on us and take us on personal tours of the museum, which means you get to have a sense of not intimidation, but perhaps ownership. Egyptian department was really good. And I was speaking with a friend of mine about, and we realized we had the same idealized vision of this thing, this artifact, a shammy shirt, a t-shirt with little incisions such that it was a fishnet stocking type of t-shirt or undershirt cut out of one piece of shammy leather thousands of years ago. How did you do that? Wow. Beautiful thing. I'm not sure it's on display right now, but he had seen it too. So these little connections that you make in the artistic world to artifacts, for example, the, uh, yellow jasper, somewhat broken face. We think it might be queen, one of the queens in yellow, Jasper exquisitely done with an exaggerated vermilion border. You know, this little edge, uh, exquisitely done. So you have these lynch pins to art that carry you forward across. And because of music, I was here when I was a teenager, I visited in the same docent who was kinda like an aunt figure, said, oh good, you're here. We just got a new kimono. I wanna show you this latest kimono. I'm saying to myself, kimono Shon, I wanna see the Egyptian stuff again. But now I'd love to see this kimono. You know, the whole world of kimono design is amazing. Visual Play. You still sing and I still sing. Where do you sing? Mm-hmm. . And where do you sing? In the church choir. But also when I visit me mum, I sing the old family songs to her. So I'm, I'm getting the sense that you sing German, I mean that you speak German. Probably sing German. Yes. Both, yeah. Guessing and English. Yeah, and English and other, sometimes A little bit Latin. Okay. That's what I was going to ask is other languages. Yeah. Uh, well, the beautiful thing about being in a glee club is you get to learn to sing in French and German. And I haven't done Russian yet, but my son has, and different languages. For example, s Requiem on so forth, he manages to match the emotions with the meanings of the words, with the sound, with the pitches and the dynamics. So just rolls beautifully. It's almost effortless. Uh, You have to work a little bit, especially when you're at speed and doing those fast passages and chromatic bits. Uh, so each one is joy. We're so fortunate to have access to it all. Yes. We have a lot of that going on here in Maine. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. A lot of crosslinking. You have to scratch a bit sometimes, but then you can find all kinds of things. What is your main connection? Tell me about that. I was born in bath Oh, so long ago. Um, but then I was thinking about this the other day. Wednesday I was shoveling snow and the snow was melting fast. We had snow season, mud season. We had some peaks of blue sky, which we love as artists here in Maine at a mosquito flew by. Well, there we are. , we're in Maine. Uh, so I grew up in, uh, I was born in bath. Um, I grew up, although my friends will say, no, you never grew up in Brookline, mass. But I always came back summers to my grandmother's house in Woolwich, and I love that. And then we have friends nearby in Nasik. I live across the street from them now. I always wanted to come back. My grandmother born in Hartford was taken when she was three years old by her mother on a boat trip from Hartford to Castine. And to her dying day, she would talk about how her mother put her on the sink and kissed her under her chin and then lifted her up to the, uh, wheeling, seagulls overhead, that sense of vertical. So after the war, she was looking for a place to educate her sons, my father and his two brothers. And Boden College is welcoming to foreign students. So she settled in Brunswick. Did your father end up going to Boden? Yes, he did. Graduated Boden. And, and during his final exams, his final exams, um, in mathematics, at one point during the exams, the professor called him for and said, Hey, fruit, I think, um, you better take a break from this and go, go see your wife in the hospital. That was me being born. Oh my goodness. , he had an interruption in all of this because the Korean War came through and he had come over from Germany in 1948. So this was all new to him. But then the Korean War started up, what do I do? What do I do? So he loved chips, but they said, no, no, no, go in the Air Force. So he went in the Air Force and played in the Air Force Band in Washington DC elsewhere and elsewhere for several years, and built model cannons. . What about your uncles? Did they go to Boen as well? Yes. My uncle Mike went to Boden. He became a banker Morgan, guaranteed bank. We all proud of him. He was a vice president of Morgan guaranteed bank. Well won of thousands, you explained. And I visited him in Munich, Germany, where he was also stationed. And my uncle Christian became, uh, was a, um, an art major at Bowen, but then went to Harvard, became a physician. I wonder who else is a physician in this room? And he worked at the, um, Loveless clinic in Albuquerque. Well, as a Bowen graduate myself. I'm very glad to hear that you have that family connection. Yeah. I'm glad to hear that Boden welcomed your father and your uncles there. Yeah. Boden was welcoming to foreign students. A long history of it, and still, Yes, that's very true. So I'm wondering about your art. Mm-hmm. , because that is mostly why you and I are connecting here today, is about your art. And in particular, I'm very intrigued by a piece that you just brought into the Portland Art Gallery. Um, well, it's a piece that was made out of an elm that we used to have. Yes. Here in Yarmouth. Yes. Herbie the Elm. Yeah. And it was here for at least a couple hundred years. I wanna Say its 230 something years, maybe. Something like that. Yes. Before they cut it down. And somehow I see this, this Instagram photo of you bringing your sculpture, which is essentially Herbie reincarnated. This speaks. How did that happen? This speaks to the inter interconnectedness of those who make things in Maine. So I was also member of the Maine Woodworkers Association, where we would get together once a month for somebody's studio and share insights and stories. And so I got a call from Chris Beckford, I think, Hey, uh, they're taking Herbie down. And so-and-so was gonna be cutting up the tree. So a bunch of us showed up one Saturday at the sawmill in, um, new Gloucester. I think there was a slab, 10 feet long, five feet wide, five inches thick on the drying rack. One piece of wood. Whoa. And everybody was buying wood. And I have found this piece that looked, oh, I wonder what I can do with this. And it didn't take long. Oh, that's what I can do with this. Uh, so to celebrate this living tree with another living being seemed appropriate as beautiful material to work. And because there were big branches, no one else wanted this piece because this big whirl you can see, or the checking where the branch had come out. I said, I didn't know what we can do with that. Leave it alone, and that'll be the feathers. And tell me about the naming of this piece. Well, originally I called it Herbie, of course, but I thought we could do a little more formal name. And Haus is, is part of the Latin name for Great Blue Heron, Ah, Heroes, something or other. So it is very interesting that you've somehow transformed one living thing to a very different type of other living thing. Mm-hmm. . And it's a very large piece. It's a almost nine feet tall. It just barely fits stag in my pickup truck. And I thought, I'm gonna put my truck, no problem. It's like, no, I'm not . Um, herons have all these different poses. So trying to capture, sometimes they, especially the smaller herons, try to stand as if they're a Reid. Don't mind me. I'm just standing here like a Reid get the fish or a frog or whatever. And they have, they always croak after you scare 'em and they take off. There are all these little things that we learn about herons being here in the coast of Maine, doing the eyes on a bird is interesting because the eyes integrate with the head, the forehead. Do they have eyebrows? Sometimes kind of depending if the feathers are wet or not. And then how the beak and the nostrils are formed. All the stuff comes together kind of right here, just as it does on people. And that's a joy to discover. You look at photographs and say, mm, I'm gonna put a pencil mark here. I'm, I'm gonna sneak up to it. Uh, but then doing this long pointy beak, since that is the business end of a bird, but it's not such a sharp point. It goes tapers and then it bottom part curves in a little bit. So all these nuances of sh of shape and form and gesture are for me, as a discoverer of them abstract. I can take it away from the critter and just think about it as a form. So people say, always doing figurative work. Well, when you're making it, it feels abstract. Maybe the figurative part is in developing the gesture and the pose, you know, the dynamic aspect of life. I seem to do that a lot. , trying to put a little bit of fhu into it. A little bit of curve asymmetry. And, and how long did this take you, this piece? Because I know that Herbie was taken down quite a few years ago, and you're describing going to get this piece from New Gloucester. Did did it take this entire time for it to present itself to you in, in its abstract form? Or have You in this one? No. Um, I had other pieces of album that I took from that collection or bought from my collection. Uh, but this, I had it out on the sawhorses. This is years ago now. It was only within a, I think it was cut down. And within a year I had the piece, maybe even half a year, but then let it dry. And then I'd pulled it out and put on Sawhorses outside. And I said, oh, and I looked at some photos, oh, here's how I could make it work. There's a little bit of devious ways and means committee working there, there was a saw cut that didn't go all the way through thin saw cut, thank goodness. So I have the tail feathers covering that saw cut on one side, and you'll see how the long leg is, uh, spliced onto that sock cut. And then there's a steel rod going all the way up through the leg into the body to make this structurally. But this is fun to do. Get the elevation, get things high up in the air. That's something I'm finding more in, in working in granite. Uh, there's a whole style of working granite where it is a monolith and you are allowed to think of it as being a very stable part of the universe. Okay, well what if I can get it up in the air and make it light? So now it's a different kettle of fish. So all these ranges of possibility. There's another piece that I've seen Andreas, that actually has motion to it. That is very interesting to Me. Yes. Oh yeah. Vo Yes. Yeah. But you don't, I don't normally think of this type of sculpture as being, um, having the possibility of motion Yes. Of kinetic. Yes. I mean, there are some sculptures and some people who sculpture, it's obvious that is what they do. I've done some of those too. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. But this one doesn't necessarily present itself at first, that way. Surprise. Yes. Yeah. So how did, how did this emerge for you Working with real materials and especially as they get larger, you think about the center of gravity and how am I gonna move it from there to there and when things? So I discovered that if I have the center of gravity slightly lower than the radius of curvature, of the base, sounds awfully geometric. It will self write. It's a self writing form unless you go too far. So I played with that, but I also was playing in that one. And the contrast between the green, the verde, the verde degree of the, uh, bronze against the reddish brown of the wood, giving us a color shift when it was photographed from various angles. The photograph that really worked was the one kind of looking at the end, but just enough that you could see through the upper hole. You could see the end of the upper hole to give a hint of, there's a passage here. And that's something that is important in sculpture, having a sense of how thick something is. And a couple of ways of doing that easily. One is, and you think you're a God when you first learn to do this, is to drill a hole through it. And the other, uh, which was used, a device used light by an English sculptor whose name escapes me, was to, um, leave a boss on each end of the sculpture. So you can see this face starts here, and it must end over there just to give cues includes to how thick it is. Well, some of the sculpture I do, they, you can tell that, right. Anyway, um, but these are interesting things to observe, take advantage of. Yeah. You bump that thing, it's heavy, but it'll self. Right. It seems like you enjoy using a variety of different types of, um, media to, I do make your works. Do you go through phases where you use one sort and then you move to the next sort? Or do you go back and forth between different sculptures? How does this work for you? So when I go up to JC Stone, one of several Stoney yards in Maine, that's my two and a half acre candy box. Ooh, look at that one over there. A few years ago, I was standing at their scrap pile, smaller pieces, you know, less than a ton. And I looked over and I saw this reddish stone behind there, big dumpster. And I said, this is at a hundred paces. And I said to myself, I think I know what that is for a shape. I'm guessing it's this. If it is, I know exactly what I'm gonna do with it. And sure enough, now it's a nine and a half foot long owl, quite abstracted in red granite, very hard red granite, and quite modernist style. Well, how could I resist it called to me. So there's this forward backwards thing. Sometimes, uh, a form suggests itself to me, or sometimes I'm looking, I'm looking for something black so I can do a whatever. So it's always this two-way prowl. And then you talked about different medium. And so combining me mediums, different materials, that's more work because you have to make one face and then fit something to it. But that's life. You're combining things. But I think that's a good clue to, another aspect of this is I feel quite facile in sculpting either by additive processes or subtractive processes. I pick up this tool, I pick up this tool, it's almost subconscious. So that's an extension of the material question. I could work this material with this tool, this tool, this tool, that tool, that tool or by hand or this, or put a chain around it, drag it down the ride behind road behind my truck to give it a glaciated surface, you know, whatever. So to break these boundaries is something that is, I think, I'll put it this way, I think it's a gift to us who work in Maine because we have access to tools and to materials and to each other. So do you learn from other people who work in the types of mediums that You, and also from those who don't work in the same mediums? Okay. Oh yeah. So give me some examples. Uh, yesterday I had a friend, Jeff Dubin come by, and he, uh, worked for years in California. And he does these exquisite geometric plaster forms, exquisitely refined, and it's shoebox size and smaller, quite quite tight geometry and with a surface finish. And he, I and I talk about a range of things. So I'm saying, okay, here we have, we just got snow. I've been thinking for years. What, how can I use snow as a quick, fast, medium for making something? So we discussed, well, we could, uh, if I heat up a pot of wax, I can paint wax on the snow. So that's what I did yesterday afternoon. But then he said, well, you know, maybe you could use algin, a seaweed product, mix it up. Maybe that's not too sensitive to the cold of the snow, that it will set up enough to create this husk around a form. And I pulled out my spray shellac to spray the , the snow, some shellac to let the wax have a little bit of grip. So when the snow melted out, there's this little spider web of white shellac that gave just enough tooth for the wax. And then I realized, uh, holding the snow melted the surface enough so that it was wet and slippery. The wax would drip off. But if it was clean snow, untouched, I could kind of get it to start and make up layers. Um, then Steve Porter, who does stainless steel work, he and I are buddies and he called me up a few years ago under us, I have all this scrap. Can you help me figure out what to do with it? Let's have a session. So I drove up and we had a lovely afternoon, and I made a couple of kind of experimental pieces, as did he just playing with shapes, no guilt and no theme, no subject. Let's play with forms. That's a lovely thing to do, to take the time to play Ernest play. We don't do that enough, I think in our world. Uh, Jesse Salsbury and I talk frequently. He does a very large granite work and we share our tool talk. Sam Finklestein, who's new to the world, he's in New Rockland, um, my DV sways and means committee. Jesse showed me a little fu geomatic grinder has a little two inch wheel on it. Oh, what a joy. That thing, it's got power from us little thing. So you can get in little corners and and do stuff. And I have a machine shop as part of my studio. So I could machine these wheels that I found that were extra course. You want to go fast? Let's go fast. I'm gonna go fine. Let's do this. You want to put a a policy pad on this? I'll make this adapter so I can adapt the tools. Then Sam said, Andreas, you had the special tool. Where did you get that? So I go on the computer and I pull up my file and I say, Ali Express, here's the model number, order that, and then get these GR wheels. And when you get 'em, come to me and I'll machine 'em for you. Meanwhile, he's doing these speaker boxes in granite. They must weigh 1500 pounds, finished maybe a little less by machining these big speaker cabinets out of granite. Well, that's an interesting thing to, to learn about. Uh, we were at a symposium a couple years ago in Hollowell, and he was drilling these six inch core holes. That's a big core hole in Granite Boy. Yeah. So you're really pushing hard. So we were sneaking up to how to drill these holes, and one of the tricks is you break some of the teeth off the core, the core drill. So there's more pressure on the existing ones. You just want to push hard. Uh, so he broke three the teeth off and the other three cut much faster. So I'm with him in parallel trying to suggest, but also watch back and forth. This is a joy. And you see what other people do. It's like, why didn't I think of that? I have a friend, Dan uci, who does very large, mostly architectural installations, fireplaces with these enormous natural stones or split stones, and he has this understanding of stone, unadulterated stone that is sublime. He'll say, no, not that one. That one. Why? You can't describe it always, but he's right. So pure over the shoulders of my colleagues is a joy. So some of what you're describing to me is this also this, this playing with the tools that you have. So there's, there's what you're working on, there's who you're working with, and then there's what you have at your disposal to do things with mm-hmm. . So it sounds like an interesting kind of interplay. I learned this from my father. You can't go to a catalog and order a reamer for an A four 40 alto in f based on bra. You have to make that reamer. So we had to set up a machine shop for machining these very crazy tapers on this hard D two tool, steel, and then machine the flutes so it cut well, cut smoothly and no chatter and give us exactly the bore. We wanted very tight tolerances. So once you learn how to make your own tools or that you can, that's another whole world. Why only do what you can buy at such and such so place. My son's colleague came visiting from California. My son gave him a tour of my studio, and later my son reported something nicely. He said, oh yeah, Dylan said, there's nothing here from Home Depot . It's all heavy duty American machine tools and, and equipment. But we do a lot of modification and a lot of jigs and fixtures on our own. I think you're, you're bringing up something that's very interesting, and that is that I think many people have gotten used to just using what, what there is commercially available. There's so much available now. And There is, yeah. Yes. But if you have the ability to look beyond what's, what's right there, then I would think that that also kind of broadens your ability to be creative, because you don't limit yourself in the same way. Suppose that you're a surgeon and you do your first appendectomy, oh man, that must be quite the ride emotionally. But then if it went well, you will have built your confidence and your courage, which now to do a double appendectomy or whatever next thing would be. So I think that's part of the joy of being in this long enough, is that you try crazy things and if you get away with it enough, you have encouraged yourself. And likewise with, um, and, and there's a, there's a, there's a nice challenge side of that. As you're becoming less challenged by the material world and the making world, your challenge for what to make also goes up. Now what's worthwhile doing? Oh, oh, I better do some more heavy duty dreaming, , you know, uh, not just scale. Sometimes the opposite is tiny, tiny detail is often much harder than big scale and much slower. But isn't that the joy of it? Yeah. If I can build a dingy, then eventually I'll be able to build a lobster boat and then a tugboat. I think of painter friends, you know, the scariest thing is the blank canvas. Where do I start? What do I do? Maybe not for everybody, but uh, so how do you get going? But once you've broken that plane enough times, it's not so intimidating. Now the intimidation is trying to get that perfect char truce by mixing this and that. Yeah. What's worthwhile doing. And then you see that beautiful rock that's calling you my love. And it doesn't matter what that is, it's just charge. Well, it sounds like you've been thinking like an artist really from your earliest years. It sounds like you've, you've been, you've been ticking in all sorts of kind of multi-sensory information that has enabled you to continue to evolve in the work that you're doing. Have you noticed any patterns in the way that you approach things or the types of things you continue to feel drawn to? What seems to have, you know, when you're, when you're a kid, you don't think of yourself as an artist or a machinist or anything. You might realize that you're pretty good with your hands or with whatever. Uh, so these labels come on later and then you start testing. Is that label accurate? Mm-hmm. , am I an artist? Am I a knuckle Drager? But we also have the opportunity to do a lot of things in, um, or, or, or to retain experiences. Uh, so for example, I was landscaping after college. I worked for GE overseas as a field engineer for heavy duty gas turbines around the world. Okay. You see a bunch of stuff. But it didn't give me an opportunity to make things. I found I really needed to make things and use my hands. So as I left that field, I was able to build my house from that. Uh, but then the landscaping, you're outside in the state of Maine, you're working your butt off physically, but every day you can see you did something visual gratification, which is nice to have. And I remember doing these. I was sent off to this fairly formal residence to make some new garden beds. There's a lawn, take out the sod, make the shape. Well, how do we do that? You get a nice big garden hose and you drape it across the lawn in the sun, so it's warm and limber. And then you make that shape with that garden hose and say, okay, that's my template. Now you cut in with a shovel around this. Meanwhile, my engineering degree is saying, okay, what's the formula? How do you make sure there's a continuous form, a continuous curve mathematically, no strange discontinuities, but the art side then says, eh, maybe. But I think a little dis continuity here would be good. A little bit of zip. So you start to build up layers of understanding from childhood all the way through, hasn't stopped yet, and see what other people do. It's like, why didn't I think of that? It's lovely. So for example, that piece that you mentioned, that rocks back and forth, uh, Jo Hemi, an architect and lighting artist in South Portland, he and I collaborated on the Wyoming project for the main maritime museum. So we got to be good buddies. We also did things for the children's museum, which he designed. So I was looking at this triangular piece of wood. I said, this is a precious piece of wood. I want to do something like this. So I called him and said, Hey Joe, let's have a session. Can you come on up? So we played with ideas and he came up with that rocker bottom and then cutting through that hole in the bottom as if it's a doorway to the other side. That was in a sense, in the design phase, collaborative. That's a joy. I may not be in his shoes artistically, that's his world, but I can try take it as another tool in my toolbox. My uncle, who's the physician, would talk about learning in surgery, how to tie knots. No, that would be a slip knot. You don't want that when you're holding this and that together, you know, in terms of sutures. But you might want it to slip in this case. And as human beings we're, we are capable of this huge wide range of possibilities and insights and feelings, and then refine 'em to this one little, little art piece. . So it sounds like you've managed to keep your creative side, um, entertained and play with that, but also use your engineering and mathematical side. Mm-hmm. is, is a means of playing with that as well. It's not necessarily that one is more logical and rational. You're just playing with things on the engineering side in a Different way. It's, it's automatic. I can't help it, but I'll tell you a little story. So I decided to go to graduate school after doing landscaping and machine tool building. So I stumbled into a program. I went for engineering degree masters at Stanford, but my advisor said, go talk to Raw Fasti. He runs the product design program. So I talked to Rolf Fasti and he said, I'll hold a place open for you in our program, in the product design program, which was originally designed academically to put the business students, the art design students and the engineering design students together or those disciplines together in one person. Typically product design is things as wide ranging as designing an appliance or designing. Well, a famous story is depends, here's a need, find a need in the world. How are you gonna solve that need? Okay, so that's designing a product for mass production. Well, I wound up doing, um, uh, deciding to take the program, but I had to do the undergraduate year first in the graduate year. So I had to finish up the engineering classes, which was fine anyway, because they're required. Um, and then the senior year, you have a trimester basis. The first trimester you are expected to, um, brainstorm and find a project worthy of the next two semesters for your master's project. And that was very difficult. Several of us, there are 16 of us or so in the program. Most had a hard time concentrating on making the assembly of those skills of the art side and the engineering side. And I remember having to consciously sit on the engineering side, no, no, don't, don't answer now. To build up the self, self-confidence in the art side. Even though I'd been exposed to art for so many decades, to build up the confidence of the art side until there's parity. And then of course you bring in other things, not just art and engineering, but music, whatever. So that was a painful shift, but intentional shift to sit there day after day, making lists, what am I gonna do? . And I came up with landscape bridges for the experience of the crossing rather than the geometry, the geology of the crossing. So I did research all around the Bay Area to all kinds of gardens. And there was this one perfect landscape bridge in the Japanese garden. It was just the right amount of lift. Not a very long bridge, maybe 20, 24 feet, but had just enough crown that as you walked up it, you could feel your body masses. It wasn't athletic thing like the Chinese bridge, and it wasn't the highway, like the American Bridge. It gave you this kinesthetic feedback loop. And I think I'm still grooving on that because you can see in a lot of my work, I still enjoy imbuing a sense of dynamic or motion, even in a very static piece. And now I can't help it. I know I'm thinking how I'm gonna mount it. I'm gonna do whatever w