Red Fish, Rosso di Verona marble, with Pietrasanta base: before polishing, at Robert Gove Studio, Carrara, Italy
The Red Fish started when I was, as ever, dumpster diving in throw-out bins. I love stones and am always alert for a fetching piece of whatever. Here was this thick plank of Rosso Verona...
Forty-five years ago, riding the Vespa, I was exploring a pretty lane winding through plots and pieces among vines and hedges and...
Excerpts from Eric Scigliano's "Michelangelo's Mountain"
“(Robert Gove is) ...perhaps the only Californian ever to make a successful transformation into ‘Carrarino’, a Virgil on a Vespa, and a wise, indefatigable guide.”
“Quarriers have tunneled beneath the mountains and dug out underground gallerie(s) the size of stadiums...
In the old days, ...this (dangerous) work precipitated the evolution of... daredevil specialists... The danger and the (pride in)... these jobs shaped a culture that still sets Carrara apart from the rest of the world—and, it often seems, from ordinary reality.”
“Even some of its streets and...downtown sidewalks are paved with smooth bianco di Carrara marble...”
“The Torrente Carrione, which runs... from the cave through the city’s heart, is a watery museum of quarry waste... After a surge, small boulders cover its bed and sometimes yield treasures.”
“Everybody who works in marble seems to have the soul of a rock hound... (Robert Gove’s) rough but spacious studio...(is) a shrine to the stone and a museum of found marble art, whose gritty surfaces set off the polished arcs and ripples of his own work.
He finds it in the streambed:...half-worked pieces, cutout negative forms and stones of indecipherable provenance but of such wise balance, you’d think some neo-Constructivist mountain troll had taken a chisel to them.”
Robert’s gesturing, Early Energy II in the background
“The finest artist
cannot conceive a thought
that the marble itself
does not bind within its shell,
waiting to be brought out
by the hand
that serves the artist’s mind.”
“I arrived in Carrara on January 1, 1969 and worked with (Carlo) Nicoli for eight years. I learned the craft from Carlo.”
—Robert Gove
Around Carrara, views of the Apuan Alps, quarry switchbacks, cutouts and the sea
One morning on the Vespa, just after Fontia, where one can see the whole valley—a beautiful, vast panorama—I realized, we all see the same things. The only difference is in our perception and experience. Then it came to me.
“You’re sculpting the PHYSICAL world.Change channels! Sculpt the SPIRITUAL WORLD!”
Robert's much-ridden, much-encumbered, much-repaired Vespa
I loaded the stones on the Vespa and then brum, brum, brum...
You don’t know how many times I’ve burned out the engine!
But, I don’t start a sculpture unless I have an extraordinary piece of marble.
I value relationships with everyone. The very young ones I try to help. As I learned, I try to teach others—and do it gladly.
To the young people I say: “Describe the sculpture as it is inside. Carving is the easiest part. Sculpture must come to you, and you must go to her."
When you have inner silence, you lack nothing.
The bird sings because he has a song. I have a song: I feel lucky.
As an artist, I feel blessed to be in Italy. For a sculptor, then, being in Carrara is the maximum.
I feel kissed by the sun because I live in Carrara. Here is my heart. Here is my place. And for this I'm a lucky man.
Ma io mi sento circondato da una luce bianca.
Ho questa abilità: Cost'vo di più.
“Robert Gove...an artist who loves California and lives as in a dream, atop the Apuan Alps.”
