JAMES GLEESON INTERVIEWS: ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF on DANILA VASSILIEFF 8 & 15 November 1979 JAMES GLEESON: Elizabeth, we‖ve got a great deal to talk about. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Indeed. JAMES GLEESON: When I look at the vast amount of work of Danila‖s. But I thought we might take as a single unit first of all, the group of sculptures that we‖ve got in the collection, and start off with the first one chronologically. That‖s one called the Hanged man. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Yes. JAMES GLEESON: Now, that was made from Lilydale rock. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Marble. JAMES GLEESON: Or marble. It was exhibited in an exhibition at the Tye‖s Gallery, April 5th to the 22nd 1949. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Good. JAMES GLEESON: So it was done prior to that exhibition. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Yes. JAMES GLEESON: You showed me some photographs of Danila working in the quarry. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Indeed. Well, he wasn‖t doing his carving in the quarry. JAMES GLEESON: No. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: He was doing his selecting. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Tell me about Lilydale rock. You told me that it had certain qualities; that it was very hard but very brittle. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Well, there are limestone beds at Lilydale millions of years old, fossil remains of corals and shellfish and tilted up to their present position under tremendous pressure. This, incidentally, was founded in 1878 by the father of Dame Nellie Melba, which is why it is called the Mitchell Quarries. 8 & 15 November 1979 JAMES GLEESON: I see. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: And still called the Mitchell Quarries. JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: In her day, all rich people had bathrooms lined with glorious polished slabs of multi-coloured marble from this quarry. JAMES GLEESON: Isn‖t that interesting? ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: It is remarkable for its variety of colour and graining. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Everything from the darkest, richest blacks and greys and yellows and pinks, and everything in between and mixtures of the same. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: But the great problem as a stone—and it was also used by stonemasons for tombstones. They had to give up using it they told us when Danila and I sought advice on how to deal with it for sculpture, because it was so hard and so brittle that it was uneconomic to use it for those purposes. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: If it was smartly tapped, it was so brittle that it would open up a seam and fall apart. Then again, the other chief advantage was its hardness. To get a polish on it—and I may say that marble is the name for any limestone that takes a polish. JAMES GLEESON: I see. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: To get a polish on it, they had to use tools, abrasive tools, which wore out seven times faster than if they were doing it on granite. JAMES GLEESON: Good gracious. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: So it cost them a lot of money to get the surface value of the stone. As well as the fact that it might fall apart because of its hardness and brittleness. JAMES GLEESON: A wrong tap at the wrong place. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: A wrong tap at the wrong place. So they stopped using it for those purposes. By the time we found it, looked at it for sculpture, it was being used for nothing but crushing up for road metal. 2 8 & 15 November 1979 JAMES GLEESON: Good heavens. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: By the tons and tons and tons. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: For commercial uses at least a ton of waste would be handed just to get to—oh well, no, no, no. I would say, you know, umpteen tons just to get one ton of usable metal. JAMES GLEESON: Is that so? ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Yes. Of course, they‖re huge faces and men get up there, giants of men with tremendous drills and they bring down enormous and they blast enormous falls. Amongst the rocks that fall there are pieces of handable, manageable size. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Anything from little pieces a foot square to something, well, more than you and I could lift. JAMES GLEESON: Go on. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Of course, because they have natural seams, they tend to fall into interesting shapes. Normally this heap of interesting shapes is just crushed up by mechanical means and used as road metal. That‖s its main use. Well, for a lot of reasons which I won‖t go into, personal reasons mainly, Danila was depressed because he couldn‖t sell his paintings. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: He was mad on stone as a material. We were building our own beautiful stone house out of Warrandyte stone on the very land we lived on. JAMES GLEESON: This is Stoneygrad. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Stoneygrad, because we didn‖t have enough money to buy anything else. I said, ―Well, why don‖t you do some sculpture? Let‖s go and get some stone‖. JAMES GLEESON: What year was that? ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: That would be in 1949. JAMES GLEESON: So his sculpture really began then? 3 8 & 15 November 1979 ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: We were married in 1947, and for two years he painted like mad, but he couldn‖t sell it. He couldn‖t live on it. He got very depressed about that. So I bought an old Ford utility truck and we went over with this thing and we asked the manager could we please buy some stone. He said, ―Buy it?‖. He said, ―You can cart it away, as much as you can carry‖. JAMES GLEESON: JAMES GLEESON: Good lord. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: When we told him we wanted to make sculptures, he thought we were rather dotty. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: He said, ―Well, I‖d very interested to see the results‖, and he always was interested. But we never could persuade him to buy any, because he didn‖t expect the kind of sculptures that Danila did. But, anyway, Danila battled on. JAMES GLEESON: In this Hanged man, the early ones were all done with hammer and chisel? ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: That‖s right, yes. JAMES GLEESON: The old method of— ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: That‖s the only tools he had. JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I see. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: This particular Hanged man was a gigantic stone. We had to get several enormous workmen to help us get it on the utility, and several enormous other people to roll it down the hill when we got home. But it was a challenge. He always looked at the shape of the stone first, and somehow saw within it something he could evoke from it. So the stone itself created the idea, and the idea was always something already in his head from his own past life. The image was already half formed in his head. So he then got to work with a hammer and chisel, tap, tap, tap, tap, tapping. I won‖t say that this was the very first one. JAMES GLEESON: No. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: This was the first big one and successful one. Because he did a lot of little ones where he learned that it falls apart, you see. JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I see. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: But in this one he could see a figure, an image of a man‖s head, a suffering man, a moustachioed man, who was in fact a hanged 4 8 & 15 November 1979 man that his image had remained with him in wartime. I think this man had been a Russian partisan. But, anyway, he typified all the many suffering humans that he had seen in the war as an officer. JAMES GLEESON: I see. This became a real theme for him. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Absolutely. JAMES GLEESON: Because it comes out in the Stenka Razin and the Unknown political prisoner. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Yes, yes. They were not only victims of war, but they very often–almost always–had a Russian cast to their features or their fashions. JAMES GLEESON: I see, yes, yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Because that was his imagery. JAMES GLEESON: Yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: This particular character had a moustache, which was apparently a very usual sort of moustache for officers and Russians in general at this time. Well now, we had to have a lot of experience with the difficulty of the hammer and chisel. It was obvious he needed a tool which would be an abrasive style of thing rather than a tap, tap hammer thing, so that the material wouldn‖t be liable to shatter. So I went and bought him, with his direction, what he wanted, because I was the only wage earner. I was working at the university as a tutor, adult education. He had no income whatsoever from any source and no patrons whatsoever. So it was hard for us to buy this thing. Anyway, we went and got I forget how many horsepower or parts of a horsepower the machine was, with a long flexible cable and an end to which we attached circular abrasive wheels. JAMES GLEESON: So you ground out the form? ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: Carborundums. Carborundums. JAMES GLEESON: I see. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: We then had to find a cheap way to get hold of carborundums, because it‖s not just a matter of getting one. You have to start with a coarse one and then work down through the finer and finer grades. JAMES GLEESON: I see, yes, yes. ELIZABETH VASSILIEFF: So, to our great delight, we found a foundry owner named Vassilieff, a Russian born gentleman, with a business in some part of St Kilda area.