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Bringing out the beauty in wood and stone
Mary
Van Abbema, stone and wood carver
As Greek mythology has it, the Cyprian king Pygmalion
sculpted a block of ivory that became the living nymph, Galatea. For millenia
sculptors and carvers have attempted the same, fashioning the earth’s materials
into living works of art. Some might say the craft is fading away, but not
master wood and stone carver Mary Van Abbema, who brought Charleston
Wood & Stone Carving to Moncks Corner
six months ago.
Abbema’s finely-wrought carvings have graced both a
Malaysian mansion and a world-renowned theatre as well as distinguished homes
in Charleston, Hilton Head and Kiawah Island. “Here, everyone knows everyone
else,” says Van Abbema. “Slowly, people are coming to me, brought by word of
mouth.”
Q. You’ve practiced your art in countries where wood and
stone carving is widely known and appreciated. Why base your business here?
What I would
like to do is bring this hand-carved work to the United States. A lot of
Charleston historic restoration could use hand carving. Because people here
don’t know it’s available, they use composite materials, plaster casts and cast
stone, which is not authentic stone.
A lot of the
carving I’m doing here is with interior designers and architects--working in
new homes and restoring old homes with carved front doors, mantelpieces and
stairways, garden sculptures, and capitol for columns (the detailed leaf and
scroll carving atop the column structure). I also do commissioned work for
churches. I customize pieces and do them all by hand.
Q. Tell us about your training.
In 1992,
after my fine arts education at the University of Minnesota, I started taking
classes from Greek master wood carver Konstantinos Papadakis. My first three
years were as an apprentice. Papadakis trained me in the classical styles—the
carvings for the Greek Orthodox Church, the Byzantine Style. If you’ve ever had
a chance to visit a Greek Orthodox church, you’ve seen that the carvings are
amazingly ornate, with beautiful decorative leaf work.
In 1995, I
went to Greece for four months and studied with a master carver in Athens.
Later, I had the opportunity to go to a wood-and-stone carving college in
England. That’s where I learned the stone carving, which is used for classical
architectural pieces there.
Q. You’ve worked on some remarkable projects. Tell us about
them.
After school
in England, I went to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and helped decorate, in stone, a
palatial estate owned by a hotel magnate. I was one of a team of 10 stone
carvers brought from England. I did decorative stone ceilings and other works
in the classical European style--leaf carvings, columns, and architectural and
ornamental pieces.
My favorite
carving was done for the recently rebuilt Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in
London, which was being rebuilt to match the original that burned down in 1613.
The Queen’s Forest was searched to find two oak trees large enough for the two
stage columns, and I did the capitol for one of the columns. Each column had to
be carved whole, with column and capitol all in one piece as it was done in
Shakespeare’s time.
Q. But if you did it wrong, you were stuck. Isn’t that a
tremendous source of pressure?
I love it! I
live for pressure, doing something I’ve never done before. That’s what gets me
up in the morning.
Van Abbema’s Web site is www.midwest-arts.com/vanabbema.
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