Lucy: Hello, Sculpture Vultures, and thank you for joining me today. Here in the UK, we are still stuck in grey drizzle land, I’m afraid. It’s very gloomy, which makes it difficult to get on with any outdoor work—something that, as you know, is my bread and butter.

Every time you check the weather forecast, it says, Oh, it’s going to be fine! And you start thinking, Ah, spring must be around the corner! It’s not quite as dark as it was! And then, five seconds later, the heavens open. Unfortunately, the kinds of treatments we use in conservation—particularly the chemicals—do not work well in the rain. So, it’s been frustrating.

But anyway, we’ve been cracking on with conservation work at a very interesting building in London. It has been called the UK’s most notorious address, which is quite the title! That’s largely down to the string of colourful residents who have lived there over the years. It’s a 1930s Neo-Georgian building in Pimlico called Dolphin Square.

Among its former residents? Ian Fleming—the man behind James Bond. Diana Dors. Some of the Carry On cast. It’s had politicians, royalty, spies, prostitutes—you name it. And if you put all those fascinating people together under one roof, well… you inevitably get a rather notorious address. The building has so many incredible stories attached to it.

So, while we’ve been carrying out conservation work, we’ve also been sneaking in a bit of research during our breaks. There’s been a lot of “ooh-ing” and “ahh-ing” as we uncover more of its history! I highly recommend looking it up—I’ll put a link in the show notes. Next week, I’ll be heading to Leeds to remove graffiti from Industry, which is one of the figures on the Victorian Monument in Hyde Park.

I’m really looking forward to returning to my home patch. My family is originally from Bradford, and I can say hand on heart—there’s no place like home. Despite having lived in London for far longer than I was ever in Bradford, I still feel like it’s home. Every time a job comes up in that part of the country, I find myself saying yes—even though I really shouldn’t! I have plenty to keep me busy in London and more than enough demands on my time. But any excuse to head back up north!

© Sabin Howard – National World War I Memorial

Now, onto today’s guest—who I am thrilled to introduce. Today, I’m speaking with the incredible Sabin Howard.

Sabin is an American-Italian figurative sculptor whose work is held in private and public collections worldwide. He has had an extremely successful professional career, but I think he’s broken through to a whole new level—possibly beyond what even he anticipated—thanks to his recently completed war memorial, A Soldier’s Journey. It is a truly colossal project. It stretches an astonishing 58 feet—and it’s the kind of sculpture you could stand in front of all day. I haven’t yet had the privilege of seeing it in person, which I’m devastated about.

It’s in Washington, DC—so not exactly around the corner from London—but I will make the journey at some point. In the meantime, I’ve spent a lot of time poring over the available images. If you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly encourage you to look it up. I’ll be adding images to the blog post that accompanies this episode on the Sculpture Vulture website.

If you’ve never visited the website, head to sculpturevulture.co.uk. All of the interviews are archived there, along with images that help bring them to life.

I began my conversation with Sabin by asking him when sculpture first entered his life.

Sabin: So, I started sculpting—not because I chose to be a sculptor, but because… well, I didn’t actually enter art school until I was 19. I wanted to create Renaissance-style art in a contemporary world. And I found myself pushed towards sculpture, because it was the most active department in terms of providing a methodology—a systematic way of translating life models into art. That was at the Philadelphia College of Art, back in the mid-1980s.

Lucy: You weren’t at home as a child playing with bits of clay?

Sabin: Oh, not at all! I was actually a juvenile delinquent.

Lucy: Oh dear!

Sabin: Yes—worse than that, really. But I ended up getting a job in South Philadelphia as a woodworker. I started on a Monday. It was October. By Thursday at four o’clock—specifically, October 22nd, at four o’clock—I had a moment. I realised: I can’t do this anymore.

And I quit. My boss said, I’m not going to pay you, so I gave him the finger, stormed out, called my dad and said, I’m going to art school. He hung up the phone and basically said, How long is this going to last? My next call was to the Philadelphia College of Art Admissions. I spoke to a woman who said, Come by, bring your portfolio.

And I said, What is a portfolio? So that’s where it all started. I was literally at zero. I couldn’t draw. But I had this idea that art was what I had seen growing up in Italy—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael…

Lucy: Donatello—real art.

Sabin: Exactly. Art that is historical, traditional—Western civilisation. That’s what I thought art was. I had no idea that there was this thing called modern art. And maybe that was for the best, because it meant I had no fear of not fitting in. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing—I just thought, Let’s go, burn the boats, make this happen.

I genuinely believed we could create Renaissance art again today. And the weirdest part? I somehow landed in the best place in the United States to actually learn how to do it. That school, unfortunately, no longer exists. It went under. It got taken over by blue-haired artists and hipsters—which didn’t help matters—and it collapsed last year.

Lucy: What a shame. So, what about your journey to becoming a professional sculptor? You clearly did go to art school and train properly—but did you transition straight into the profession after graduating, or was it tough to find work?

Sabin: I think I’ve been lucky because I’m really creative. I don’t spend much time looking at what other people are doing—I tend to lead from my gut. I did finish art school, but for the last two years, I went back to Rome. So I had this really deep education—my time in the United States was all about structure, about how to put the figure together.

Then, when I went back to Rome in ‘85 and ‘86, I learned about unification—how to bring all these separate elements together into a holistic whole. Because when you look at a great sculpture, you don’t see parts. You see one sculpture. Now, looking back nearly 42 years later, I can see that sculpting the figure this way is actually philosophical.

It’s rooted in the belief that the universe is one unit, made up of many interconnected parts. And those parts interact in a hierarchy to create a greater whole. That’s not what most of the contemporary art world is doing. Modern art is often fragmented, ironic, chaotic—disconnected from tradition. And I’d say that’s actually why I’m here on your podcast today—to explain where I think art should be going.

I believe we need to revere the art of Western civilisation and the monuments that were created centuries ago—because they are still profoundly important. I’ll tell you why they matter. Because they unify us. They act as a kind of cultural umbrella, something that binds us together and gives us a shared visual language.

Lucy: Absolutely. And I think sculpture, in particular, is one of the few art forms that has almost no barriers to entry. There are so many people who never step foot in a museum or a gallery, yet they do engage with public art. And usually, they have positive memories associated with it.

Maybe they waited next to a particular sculpture before a first date with someone who became important to them. Maybe they passed it every day on their way to work, and over time, it became part of their routine.

They might not have been drawn to the sculpture for artistic reasons, but it became embedded in their lives in a way that even the biggest-selling painters—the ones dominating auction houses—never will.

Sabin: You’re making a really good point. Take an artist like Sargent, for example—or the war memorials in London. Think about the Paddington Station War Memorial—the sculpture of the letter carrier. It’s an amazing piece. It unifies people.

Anyone walking past that sculpture understands it immediately. They don’t need to read an essay about it. It’s visceral. It speaks to something innate in us. And it moves people—it elevates them. It encourages a higher consciousness. That’s why I have such an issue with modern art—because so much of it doesn’t do anything for the general public.

For a lot of collectors, it’s all about monetary value. How much is it worth? But it has no spiritual value. It has no craft. And if you want to understand it, you need to read endless academic texts explaining what you’re supposed to see. It’s a scam, really.

And that’s really it—we need to take art back. I almost think of it like the Pharisees in the temple—when Jesus came in and kicked them out. That’s what we need to do. We need to clear them out and reclaim art for the people. Art should be about elevating us, about higher consciousness.

I mean, why would you willingly go and look at something that is, frankly, a piece of crap—something that makes you feel like crap as well? It’s time to say no. And I think there are a lot of political movements moving in that direction. I genuinely believe that art is going to get caught up in that shift, because culture and life are inextricably linked. Like you said—if you arrange to meet someone at a monument, you are in life, not in the art world. You are living. You say, I’ll meet you at that statue, and while you’re there, you notice the sculpture. You engage with it. And sometimes, it changes you.

© Sabin Howard – National World War I Memorial

Lucy: We’re at a moment in time where people are really questioning what has been put up in the past. There’s been a lot of energy—and rightly so—a lot of debate around public monuments. And I think people are starting to realise that public art is theirs in a way that perhaps wasn’t the case not that long ago.

Historically, someone else—some governing body, some institution—decided what was put on plinths. But now, people feel they have a voice in public art. They have a say in what should stay and what should go. And maybe that’s why we’re seeing a bit of a renaissance in public sculpture. We have some really interesting new public works being commissioned, at least here in the UK.

Pangolin—the foundry you’ve worked with—is doing a lot of good in that area. They always have, but they’re currently producing some magnificent pieces.

Sabin: Yes, but it’s really dangerous when politics and politicians stray from their lane—which is governance—and try to insert themselves into art. They don’t belong there.

What’s happened is that all these political ideologies have infiltrated the art world. But these ideologies are about politics, not about art. And that’s what woke me up to all of this. Because politics operates at a lower level. It is not about high consciousness, not about beauty. Art and politics are not on the same plane. Politics is—let’s be honest—a cesspool.

Most politicians aren’t what they appear to be, yet they’re trying to impose their ideologies onto the art world—when art is meant to be about higher consciousness, elevation, and beauty.

People are starting to question what’s going on. And they’re not paying attention to the art world in the same way anymore—because it’s stopped attracting them. But I think a lot of artists are waking up to this. I really got pulled into the political side of things because of my national memorial.

That memorial had to pass through government approval. And I quickly realised that many of the people sitting at those desks, making decisions, had never been to a museum. They had never studied art. They had never travelled to Europe or London to experience sculpture in its historical context. And yet, they were passing judgement.

They were all suddenly experts in art and sculpture—at least in their own minds. And I feel strongly about saying this, because it’s wrong. They don’t belong in those discussions. They weren’t involved in the creative process, they weren’t invested in the artistic or sacred aspects of the work. They were making decisions for political reasons, not for artistic reasons.

Lucy: I have to take my hat off to you for actually managing to produce that memorial. It’s one thing to create the sculpture itself, but getting it past the powers that be—that’s a whole other challenge.

People don’t often realise that monuments go through different stages before they ever see the light of day. And that stage—the approvals, the permissions, the bureaucracy—that can be one of the hardest. Even if you have the funding in place, even if the sculpture is ready, there are still so many hoops to jump through before it actually gets installed.

Lucy: Was that a challenge for you? Did you struggle with that process?

Sabin: It was incredibly hard. There were so many gates, so many stages before I was even allowed to sculpt. First, there was the competition—it was global, with 360 teams applying. Then, they narrowed it down to five finalists. We got through that first gate back in 2015. For six months, we went through a gruelling process—five meetings, endless presentations

January comes, 2016, and we’re announced as the winners. Even my partner and I found it surreal because, well—he was just a kid, 25 years old, not even a licensed architect. Meanwhile, I had been sculpting for 35 years. There was already a huge disparity in our team.

But, ironically, that worked in favour of sculpture. If my partner had been an established architect, we would have had constant arguments about scale—how big the sculpture should be. But Joe Weishar, being 25, just said, Make it as big as you possibly can.

There was no reining me in—I had complete freedom to go big. The Centennial Commission, which ran the competition, didn’t really know exactly what they wanted. But they were traditionally minded. They referenced the Grant Memorial in front of the Capitol—a stunning sculpture completed around 1920, which took 20 years to create. That was essentially the model for what we needed to achieve. It had to be dynamic, dramatic, and visceral—something that would move and engage people. And as an artist, I had to learn how to do that.

Up until that point, I had spent 35 years sculpting male nudes—esoteric figures rooted in Greco-Roman tradition, more academic in nature. But this project forced me to become an artist who was contemporary. I had to reinvent classicism in a way that fit modern audiences.

We live in a world shaped by films, visual storytelling, and digital media. Everything is movement-oriented. People today aren’t looking for allegorical symbols—they want something immediate, something that connects with them on a human level.

So that’s what I created. I won’t go into all the political battles I had to fight to make it happen, but let’s just say—at one point, I was physically knocked off my feet by the stress of it all. I lost 30 pounds in a single month. But I still fought through. It took me four years to get through all the bureaucratic obstacles—four years just to be allowed to sculpt.

Lucy: That vision—that scale of thinking—one of the things I spoke about on the podcast last year was this idea of thinking big. And how hard it is to actually imagine and pursue a huge dream.

Did you always have that big vision from the start? Or did it grow little by little, getting bigger as you realised what was possible? Because the idea that you could conceive of something this epic from the outset is just astonishing to me.

Sabin: Thank you, Lucy. For me, this is just how my mindset works. It’s the same as when I went to art school—I wasn’t looking at what everyone else was doing. I was thinking about the Medici Tomb, the Last Judgment, the Sistine Chapel. I was looking at Washington’s great monuments—the Grant Memorial, for example.

That thing is huge—two massive plinths with 20-foot-long horse sculptures, plus Grant on horseback towering above. We’re talking about a hundred metres of sculptural space. I wasn’t thinking, Oh God, how am I going to pull this off? I was thinking, Burn the boats. There’s only Plan A. There is no Plan B.

Joe, the architect, came in with 116 linear feet—one foot for each of the 116,000 American soldiers who died in World War I. And I just started drawing. One step at a time. It was on-the-job training—learning as I went, taking the hits, getting knocked down, figuring out how to get back up again.

Looking at it now, I realise just how insane it was—I did 25 iterations of the design in just nine months. I took over 12,000 images of human poses—just to create 38 final figures. And on top of that, I was dealing with lawyers and bureaucrats who had no artistic background but had all the power to say yes or no. They would literally take a red marker, put a circle around a figure, and then either give it a tick or an X. Yes. No. Yes. No.

And I would just stand there thinking, WTF? But you just bite your tongue and keep going.

Lucy: Yeah…

Sabin: So, eventually, we got through that. I did a final drawing—took me 700 hours—and in the second year, I had to push it through fast. Then, I went rogue. I left for New Zealand. Spent nine months there working on a ten-foot model. I literally went 9,000 miles away from Washington so that nobody could interfere. Then I shipped the finished model back to DC.

And when they opened the crate—these tough, reserved government officials actually started crying. I have footage of it. And these are not the kind of people who cry in public. But I had created something that moved them. Because I didn’t make a memorial glorifying war. I hate war. I made a monument about human beings—about sacrifice, about struggle, about the real human cost. And that’s what made it different.

© Sabin Howard – National World War I Memorial

Lucy: Yeah, actually, I was going to ask you which part of it was the hardest for you. Looking at it from a viewer’s perspective, there is such a huge amount of emotion in that sculpture. And you—you’ve given that emotion. I thought to myself, That must have been incredibly hard to sculpt. Because it’s exhausting to pour out just one day of emotion, let alone across all those figures, over and over again.

You must have been wrung out, I would imagine.

Sabin: I’m going to be honest about this. Sculpting—I seem to have unlimited energy. I have more energy than is humanly possible. I’ve thought a lot about this because it’s always been that way for me. I mean, think about it—here I was, doing figurative art for 35 years in New York City.

And that’s the last place on earth where you’d think you could sell male nudes. Yet, I managed to survive. For 35 years, I carried the load—I was selling two to three bronzes per month entirely on my own, without a gallery. I had moved out of the gallery system and was running my own business.

So, when I got this memorial project, it was like—I can change my life. I didn’t have to suck up to all these clients I couldn’t stand anymore. And I could finally be honest with myself—because now, I was going to get a steady paycheck, month after month, quarter after quarter. That’s a huge deal for artists.

I know other artists will understand this too—when you have a steady flow of cash, you can be even more creative because you’re not constantly worrying about how you’ll pay your bills. So all my energy went into making this sculpture.

And then something happened to me. Something that changed me forever. I learned about the concept of service to others. I learned this because we used combat veterans—men who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq—as our models.

These were grown men, and all of them had come back from war mentally scarred. And I was working with them, one-on-one, sculpting them from life, not from photos, not from computer references—from life. That meant spending intimate, intense time with them.

I was three feet away, five feet away, studying every detail of their faces, their bodies. And I realised—your face and your body hold the history of everything you’ve been through. These men had put their lives on the line in service to their country.

And when I truly understood that—when I saw what that meant, up close—it shattered me. I realised this memorial was not about art. It was about service. It was about honouring what these soldiers had done—not just a hundred years ago in World War I, but what they continue to do, across the world, today.

And that’s why the piece is called A Soldier’s Journey. Because it’s the first monument dedicated to their journey—leaving home, entering battle, being transformed, and finally coming back home.

Lucy: So actually, possibly the hardest part… was also the most fulfilling part for you?

Sabin: Well said, Lucy. Well said.

Lucy: Yeah. I’ve got to say—it is a spectacular piece. I mean, I’m sure that with a mind like yours, there will be more spectacular things to come. But I think the fact that you managed to bring so many elements of that story into a single sculpture—one that you don’t even need to know much about war to understand—That’s incredible.

I mean, even young people—someone with no background in history—would still be able to look at your figures and immediately grasp what the story is. So I wondered—did you ever feel like there was an element of serendipity with this project? Or were you just the right man for the job—the right person, at the right time?

Sabin: I think there was a tremendous amount of serendipity. But my whole life has been this way.

I mean, why the hell did I land in Philadelphia, of all places, and end up in the best art school in the world for learning how to do this? And why the hell did I end up in Rome? I grew up in Italy—I’m both an Italian and American citizen.

Sabin: How? What? It’s like I have a huge advantage over Americans because I know what beauty is. And I have no fear in looking at history as something I can draw from.

These things—these gifts—they’ve been given to me. Why can I speak about my art honestly and well? I’m not bragging—it just comes naturally to me to speak about what I do. I understand things. I think from a deeper level, and I think that’s why I’ve always risen to the occasion.

I mean—challenge? I didn’t know how to make a memorial. I had never made a single piece of public art in my life. There’s no book out there—there’s no Making Monuments for Dummies. I had to come up with a system.

And why did Pangolin come onto my horizon? I spent three months searching across the United States. I looked at 35 different foundries, and I was bollocksed. I couldn’t find the right foundry. I needed a foundry with the right system, and I wasn’t finding it.

And then—one week before I was due to give my report—I’m on Instagram, searching for bronzes. And I stumble across Nick Bibby—the animal sculptor. Massive. He did that huge bear—Indomitable, I think it’s 15 feet high, maybe 18. It’s large.

And I see this flawless, immaculate bronze sculpture, and I send him a message. He replies—“Oh, hi Sabin, I love your work too.” And the next day, we’re on the phone. We talk for an hour and a half and he tells me about Pangolin. And then—I call Pangolin, I get through to Steve Maul, the Foundry Director. We chat for an hour, and by the end of that week—I’m on a plane.

I walk in to their reception office—And behind the receptionist, on the console, there’s this bronze cast of a dodo bird, an extinct bird, a full skeleton. And I just think—Bingo. I’ve found the right foundry. Because think about it—A dodo skeleton. Every bone in the body, completely deconstructed. They’ve moulded it, re-patinated it and after a flawless casting job, it’s standing there—completely intact. And not just intact—it’s kinetic, you can feel the movement in it. It’s alive. It just screamed aesthetics, craft, skill, and I didn’t find that in the United States, it’s really sad.

Every step of the way, I was being guided. It was like—something larger than me was at work here.

Lucy: But, I mean, you also have the fantastic sculpture world. I have never met better people than the people who work in sculpture—and sculptors themselves. It’s such a selfless field. People want to help you. They want sculpture to rise.

And there isn’t the kind of pettiness that you get in other industries. Because we all appreciate greatness and skill. And also—it’s not just about skill. It’s about the need to bring things into the world. It’s about creation and you—you’re a vehicle for that. And I think we all recognise that kind of unique—I don’t know if you can call it spirituality—but it’s something.

It’s some kind of fusion of the two and I think that’s why we all want to help each other. If we can make that road easier to travel—then that’s the way forward.

Sabin: It’s so much larger than you and I in this conversation. We are working within a tradition and that tradition lasted from the Greeks onwards. Of course, there was art before them—but if you look at Greek work, and then Greco-Roman work, and then Florentine sculpture, and then Canova, Rodin—

There is a legacy and they all believed in this idea of spirituality, that there is something larger than ourselves. And there’s something very honest about sculpture. Because what you make—That is exactly where you are as an artist, there are no smoke and mirrors, it’s a physical object.

You make it with your hands, your head, your heart. It changes you. Because it is manual labour, but also an act of intelligence and so there’s no hiding behind the masquerade of all these empty shows. You know, these gallery exhibitions where nothing is there.

It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes, only now, the Emperor is an artist. And people are told that this genius artist has created something extraordinary—When actually, he’s just a scam artist. It’s garbage, and yet, somehow, that garbage is worth £80 million. It’s BS. It’s—The banana on the wall.

Lucy: Gaffer tape—are we talking about?

Sabin: Yes, it’s complete nonsense. And the general public thinks, Oh, I don’t get it. Maybe I’m not educated enough, but you are educated enough. You’re a human being, you have, in your hard drive, the ability to understand things. Because it’s there. You’re born with it. It’s innate.

And yet, you’ve been told—Oh, you don’t understand it because you haven’t read the books. Well—great. You haven’t read that garbage. Because you don’t need to, it’s nonsense.

And when I made the sculpture—and people came, and they cried, it was because we had created a community of humanity. We were all in the same boat. We all have these feelings of pride, of sadness, of family, of service to country. These are things that people understand and that—that’s what counts.

© Sabin Howard – National World War I Memorial

Lucy: Yeah, I mean, I think you do yourself a slight disservice, actually. Because although your referencing comes from the classical world, from Renaissance sculptors, what you have put into that classical form is an authenticity—And a level of emotion that wasn’t always present in the sculpture of previous eras.

I mean, yes, you can argue for Rodin, who’s much closer to our time. But a lot of classical sculpture, bronze sculpture, as brilliant as it is—it’s often static. Its charm is in how contained those figures are. Their emotion is held within their form.

You’ve broken out of that. You’ve taken those classical forms and you’ve brought in your own passion, your own understanding of what you’ve seen in the veterans, in the people of that story.

And that—that differentiates you. You’re not just reproducing classical art.

Sabin: You’re 100% right. But I want to add something to that. I live in these times, and because I live in these times, I’ve been exposed to cinema and cinema is all about extremes in emotion. That affects us—as human beings today. So I’m just being honest to my experience of living in this time period. The art of Michelangelo—in his time—His art was seen as explosive, dynamic, visceral.

It was modern. And it’s the same as what I’m doing today. But we are in different times, we’ve progressed. So I use the past as a vocabulary, but I filter it through my own experience as a human being in 2025, and that’s why my work has more emotion than the past. Because, like you so correctly said, classical sculpture was often contained.

But we—we don’t live that way anymore. So if you ignore your circumstances, if you ignore the world around you, Then you’ve failed, because then you’re just being archaeologically redundant. You’re resuscitating the past, but not moving it forward.

I’m not just taking these ideas and placing them on hollow ground, I’m carrying the fire forward. I’m saying—This—this needs to be re-established. Because art is not about cerebral values, It’s for everyone. And so—just as in society—There are many levels of understanding.

And so, art—great art—Has to work on all levels.

Lucy: One of the things that has really impressed me, Sabin, is how well you’ve documented this. From my perspective, it looks like as much work as the actual sculpture. You’ve covered so many different types of media, you’ve spoken about the project from so many angles. You haven’t just repeated the same thing over and over again. You’ve talked about different aspects of it.

Is that part of your process? Or is it just really important to you?

Sabin: I am so blessed. My wife is amazing, I cannot say enough about her. She points my head in the right direction. She was a novelist before this project began, and she put down her writing and became the project manager and documentarian, she documented the whole journey. So, you can imagine, this is a very intimate journey and we’re showing it this year. It’s called Heroic.

Lucy: Yes! I hoped you’d say when it’s coming out because I wasn’t sure.

Sabin: June—this coming year.

Heroic: Sabin Howard Sculpting a National World War I Memorial. And listen, we had footage running all the time, we caught everything. It is not a polished documentary, it is gritty. I am not some perfect human being, I have a temper, I fire people, I yell, I have heart. My wife calls me an Italian opera, I’m dramatic and all of that—it’s in the footage.

And I am so grateful to her for capturing that, because it makes the understanding of this memorial so much more intimate for the public. I am not some highbrow, detached artist, I work with my hands, I use my head—but I am also a labourer. I will get down on my knees and do what’s necessary.

I don’t sit in an office, meeting collectors and clients, while my crew does the sculpture. No, I am on the floor with my crew—kicking their ass, moving it forward. And I make plenty of mistakes, and all of them are in that film and that’s what’s necessary.

My goal—with the film and the monument is to redirect art. To push it in the right direction.

Lucy: Well, my goal is to gather a big group of Sculpture Vultures and we’re all going to go and see the film. My whole team we are all going. Every month, we try to do something outside of work and now, June is in the diary. We’re going.

Sabin: It’s going to be something, because I don’t think we’re going to release it small. It’ll go global.

Lucy: We’ll send you some photos of our—

Sabin: I love it. I love it. Yeah, we should have her on. You should have her on to talk about this documentation.

Lucy: Oh, that would be amazing! If she has the time. I’m sure she’s overrun at the moment.

Sabin: Yeah, she’s finishing up now, in a few months, just before we launch. We should definitely put her on.

Lucy: Well, I must talk to her anyway, because I also write novels—about sculpture. So I’m sure we’d have a lot to talk about. Can you tell everyone where they can find out more about you if they’d like to?

Sabin: You can find me at SabinHoward.com.

I’m on Instagram: Sabin Howard Sculptures.

And on X: Sabin Howard.

There are a lot of articles I’ve been doing, like you said. I really try to go in all directions. Art is not only in the art world—it’s cultural, and culture is the tip of the spear in the real world. So I’ve done a lot of stuff lately.

Lucy: Thank you very much for today. I really appreciate it.

Sabin: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Lucy. Thank you for having me on. It’s an honour.

© Sabin Howard

Lucy: Now, Sabin is a fascinating character, isn’t he? And, I mean—no wonder he has produced such an exceptional piece of work. I think if he can teach us anything—it’s how not to become completely overwhelmed by a big project. And this? This is big—by anyone’s calculation. I really love that he found solace in his home country.

He looked to the Sistine Chapel, to the Medici Tomb, and actually, what came to mind for me was that wonderful line in the film The Edge with Anthony Hopkins, which you must watch if you haven’t already.

He says: “What one man can do, another man can do.” And that—I think—is what Sabin did. I think he looked to those greats and thought “You know what? I’m up to this challenge.”

He has what he describes as a “burn the boats” mentality, like there’s just no Plan B.

And this mindset—for him—is what bolstered him. Some people might shudder at that concept but for him, it made him stand up and face that unprecedented challenge.

I love that he draws from the classical tradition, he’s clearly an incredibly skilled sculptor but he is also not dismissive of modern tastes. He says—we are a society educated by cinema and his sculpture work is very cinematic. Every single section of that war memorial is like a film scene, placed side by side and there’s something incredibly contemporary about the way he is using the classical language.

It’s a fusion that maybe, on paper, doesn’t seem like it would work, but it really does. And he is a funny fusion himself. Because, although he is using modern techniques and approaches, he also feels resistance to certain trends in the current art world. Rather than trying to fit into contemporary art, he is deliberately challenging it.

He is speaking out against works that—he feels—exclude the public, he believes that art shouldn’t require academic interpretation. That education and opportunity shouldn’t be barriers to understanding art and he is setting himself up as somebody who will fight for that cause. Now, while I’m not sure I have as strong views on the subject as he does, it is clear that he believes in it deeply. And it has distinguished him.

He is someone who is committed to the idea that public art has a meaningful role to play. That it can serve the public in a way that no other art form does. And finally, Sabin acknowledges just how essential his partnership with his wife has been. She has obviously been an immensely supportive person emotionally but also, they were divided for a long time while he worked on this project, and she has put up with that for the cause. But, more than that she has put her own work aside to document this story.

Behind art—and it’s something that I feel quite passionate about—because in conservation, documentation is absolutely an essential part of modern conservation.

This is something that, historically, in restoration, was never really done. It was kind of like—oh, there was a before and after picture and that was it. But there was no documentation of the thought process of what went into the restoration or conservation process. And now—this is a big part of it.

Now, when I come across statues that look different than they should I don’t understand what happened to them in the past, because all of that documentation wasn’t there. There’s this absence of thinking that is documented. And here, we have an artist collaborating with their partner, ensuring that as much as possible is understood about the making and thinking behind this sculpture, and I think that is going to be so invaluable for people going forward.

It’s certainly going to be invaluable for those who are responsible for looking after that monument in the future. But also for everyone who wants to discover the fascinating details that go into making something like this. I am really looking forward to seeing the documentary Heroic. I mean—it’s going to be fireworks of fun. You’ve got this fiery Italian-American personality, he’s creating something so emotional and so beautiful and at the same time, so painful too.

These themes that he’s dealing with, but yet it’s all done in this really stressful situation. I mean, the workshop studio is stressful at the best of times, but with a project like this? I would imagine particularly stressful. I mean—you must think you’re never going to finish at times. So I reckon this is going to be fireworks and incredible entertainment. I am going to be front row with popcorn.

Please support the show by buying one of my non-fiction books about how to care for bronze sculpture, or the principles behind bronze conservation. Or, you could pick up one of my novels, where sculpture is always at the heart of the story. This really helps with the many costs associated with the show and I really appreciate it. You can find my books on Amazon, or wherever books are sold. You can order them in bookshops, they should be everywhere.

You can also support the show by telling a friend. We need as many sculpture vultures as possible in our tribe, and there are lots out there. If you can just spread the word.

I look forward to speaking to you in the next couple of weeks.

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