Vignettes

The Apuan Alps cradle the world’s most precious white marble and stretch 55 Kilometers between the Serchio and Magra rivers across Northern Tuscany.  Carrara, Italy, where Richard has worked for over 40 years, is nestled in the mountain range along the Carrione river.

Richard’s sculpture is imbued with the history of this special place. The marble with which he works is pulled from the same quarry as Michangelo’s “David”, the artwork that set his future in motion. As soon as he saw “David” he knew he’d devote his life to those mountains of marble.

During one of those early visits to Carrara, Richard met photographer Joel Leivick, another artist who had been struck by the same visceral inspiration:

“With its overwhelming mass, as in no other place I have seen, Carrara is the scene for a primordial revealing of elements. At every turn the human as well as the geological record is exposed. The noble outcroppings of stone and the most mundane debris–layers of a complex history–were set before me, defined by brilliant, revelatory light. This was a landscape that could sustain me for years, and so I went to work, absorbed by the dust, in a fever of concentration.”