Christian Lange: A devil’s tool

Materially Speaking

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Christian Lange apprenticed as a chiseller in Freiburg, Germany, and started out as a stonemason restoring churches before coming to Pietrasanta to try his luck as an artist. Then he fell in love and his work took a slightly different direction. He decided to build his career as an artisan and now creates ornamental pieces and sacred art, as well as collaborating with artists to realise their visions in marble.

He talks about the responsibility of selecting a block of marble to work on, outlining some of the challenges in finding the right piece for a particular work.

Christian also teaches sculpting courses and has his own apprentices. He reflects on the new technology acknowledging that an air hammer or electric powered chisel, ubiqitous in sculpting today, would be considered a devil’s tool by the artisans of a hundred years ago. He laments the dearth of young apprentices coming up the ranks. In his day, he says ‘the apprenticeship was three years where we worked only by hand. No electric power tools, no air pressure, everything with really very old-fashioned hand-tools. Slow. But for learning, I still believe that learning something slowly is probably better.’

He loves the challenge of making figurative work but says that it is more expensive because it takes much more time.

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