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I'm a gold smith
yes, I use gold amongst the scores of other materials which I work and
shape to the needs of my imagination.
But I feel that being a gold smith is really more
a statement of philosophy and mental approach to what I create.
What are you actually doing at the moment?
It's the phoenix centre piece
and I'm just massing out the feather forms before detailing them.
It's rather like working clay
it's just to mass it up into the rhythms I want it.
In this I'm following, because it's as it were,
the inspiration for the piece, the forms found in a pair of birds which have
been added to a pair of Meissen vases from the mid 18th-century.
Having ruffted into the shape and how the feather forms work
I'm now engraving the wax and cutting it
And here all the time I'm just dealing with light, because these are just
surface marks which should suggest to the brain that they are looking at feathers.
I don't want to chase a casting ever. By chasing I mean chiselling and compacting it with little
punctures and leaving textures which again are dealing with light, with tiny amounts
of shadow, but I think that you can achieve that with the wax and a clean cast.
And I think there is something quite honest about carving the wax and then leaving it as far
as possible to become the metal that is its destiny to become.
Well it's a glorious day and I'm standing here, in one of my favourite Canaletto paintings
and it's one that happens to be in the Wallace Collection.
In that view Canaletto set his scene
with a cast of ladies and gentlemen, children, priests, beggars and his much loved dogs.
You can't doubt that when you look at any
Canaletto, you'll find these wonderful dogs, usually with those curling tails. This one
certainly appears in the piece that I've made in response to this great painting.
So how did it get here?
The first Marquess of Hertford was on the
Grand Tour, towards the end of the 1730s. Whilst in Venice he bought this, probably
through Consul Smith. He was a real Mr Fix-It in Venice at the time. And he acted as agent to Canaletto.
So if you wanted a Canaletto you'd better get it through him, because you'd
get a good one and you'd get it quicker.
Just across the Grand Canal from us here
stands a small white palazzo with its feet in the water.
It's called the Palazzo Balbi Mangilli Valmarana.
But I think that it should be named Palazzo Smith after the man
who gave it its elegant palladium façade, the British Consul, Joseph Smith.
I have kidnapped many of these wonderful characters and frozen them in gold, in order to install
them in small memorial niches in the base of the Gallery glass that I have made for Consul Smith.
Who after all was Canaletto's agent but he was much more than that.
Kevin why did you pick this?
Well I think they all picked me really in a sense.
But look at her, how can you resist her. She became a superstar overnight at the age of 16
and clearly had a great performing charisma, which is why Lancret I think
has painted her in this way, which is very theatrical. It seems like a backdrop and flats
and these very theatrically placed musical groups, each with a different sound, the pipe and tabor
the recorder and two violins and here a bassoon.
What did you with Madame de Camargo?
I collaged in layers a theatre, with the false perspectives and made a piece which I then
extended with oil paint and then I made a jewel which lifts out of that, and that jewel
is Madame de Camargo dancing.
It looks as though we have a bird,
well this is one phoenix that has risen from the flames.
I should like you not to listen to me but
instead to listen to the sound of this painting.
This is the sound it has been making silently
for the last 2 ¾ centuries. It is the Wallace Collection's Grand Turk giving a concert to
his mistress, painted by Carle van Loo and featuring among other occult identities a
portrait of his wife Christina Somis, a leading opera star at the time.
It is she who is seated at the two manual harpsichord, playing and singing as we can see from her music
'Si caro, si', that final aria from Handel's opera Admeto, which resolves misunderstandings
and placates the love between husband and wife.
Within the painting I think I have been able to identify
Christina's almost then equally well-known musician brothers as cellist and first violinist.
But more crucially given the musical clue, I have found lurking in the shadows behind
his wife, the presence of the artist himself It led to my own work, a jewel, in fact a
broach, which like Carl and Christina's is a marriage of two senses.
I have set my detachable jewel within a painted wall mount
contrived as a kind of palimpsest of the canvasses hidden geometry and silent music.
Well I think it's one of the most compelling portraits of all time,
and certainly one of the Wallace's greatest treasures
It sums up the whole thesis of what I'm doing, in that it is this time regained
it is leaping across time to a moment
which is a communication between son and father, father and son.
And every time somebody comes to view this painting, they are standing in Rembrandt's shoes
because this is the distance that he would have been from that canvas when he painted it.
What have you done to try to recapture for us that time and that moment?
Well, I'm a goldsmith, so I used goldsmith materials and I've made a broach which goes
into a wall mount but here I was lucky because I found, within all the things I collect,
some wonderful pieces of petrified wood, which are a strange simulacron for the Chiaroscuro
voids, the browns and grey which are in this canvas and of course, the feature which I
have made is the hat, because this wonderful glow of red, which is a further link between
father and son because there is a contemporary self-portrait, which is in Stuttgart
in which Rembrandt paints himself with the same hat.
Do you find it incredibly difficult to control
everything that is going on, to concentrate, to draw it in to the point in hand.
No, I think you separate things but don't forget that the energy is always to do the
work, to do find what it is that's itching that has to be resolved. So these things are
just different colours within that composition.
Had you live 400 years ago, could you have used your ideas
in the workshop and therefore everything would have sprung out of you but you would have had people.
Gosh, isn't that wonderful.
I could certainly do with that now because if I seem tired, it's because I am working very long hours
in order to finish the pieces for the show.
The show is in June but the pieces have to be finished by the end of March I'm told.
The bird, the egg and the main upper nest all fit together with one screw.
And locating that screw can be a bit tricky.
For me making is believing and it is living. It is how I see the world and try to understand
my place within it and within time.