Recently, I’ve returned to making ceramics.It was my main preoccupation for most of my career. I thought through that material more than others. My first professional exhibition was ceramics and drawings. I held them in equal esteem, but the materiality and process of ceramics formed the metaphorical framework of my image making. Drawing and ceramics are close companions. If you remove the western art hierarchy of mediums, it is easy to see that working in clay, drawing and even painting come from the same well. Something handed and direct, wet and primal that stands in contrast to carving or casting. Through ceramics, I found my way into other material histories and traditions. I spent more time considering the vernacular such as brick and tile work, serving vessels, archaeological digs and objects that come alive in the everydayness of home.
I needed a break from ceramics in the last six years or so. I concentrated on painting. There were encounters in art history that needed tending to. Now, I am called back to clay. In particular, the role that vessels play as metaphor and container for fermentation and alchemy. In my studio where I paint, but don’t work in clay, there are many of my sculptural vessels on the old growth industrial beams that line two walls. When I look at the paintings together with the ceramics, I see kinship. Through-lines that might not be overt become clear in close quarters. I’m not sure if the odd observer necessarily sees the connections to a larger practice. If we’re conditioned to categorize by superficial qualities such as medium or surface it might seem like the artist lacks focus. Tendrils of connection can be invisible; only taking form in idea or language or even a proclivity to touch.
While making a series of sculptures for an upcoming show, I made as series of small cups. I like these handleless cups for coffee or wine. They fit the hand nicely. I generally use an opaque white majolica glaze on red terracotta. I decided to go back to another surface I haven’t used in a while. Inspired by medieval slipware I used a yellowish slip on the red clay. When using a wide, thick-bristled brush, a variegated texture is achieved. The brush strokes play peek-a-boo with opacity – some being thick yellow others allowing the clay body to show through. I use an opaque black underglaze to draw on top of that. It creates a simple but dynamic relationship of mark and surface. A clear, gloss glaze deepens all the colors.
I was going to do drawings: maybe something figurative or some object. I decided for these vessels, just line and shape would be enough. These pots come alive in context. Whether they are filled with green olives or a deep red chile sauce passed around the table; hand, color and texture leap into being. I have some habits and tics that I rarely question anymore, though it would be useful to do so every now and then. I have a vocabulary of stripes and hatch marks, loops and whorls. I work quickly and intuitively. These marks are made in response to the curve of the pot. For this round, I’ve been trying to be more conscious of why I make these seemingly non-objective patterns and where they come from. A lot of my research this summer has been about Iron Age Europe and the place where Roman and Celtic collide. The whorls, steppes and looped lines are always in reference to something. When I started to decorate this set of cups, I was thinking about bird feathers and snake’s scales. Something watery was emerging as well. I was quite pleased as I worked through all the cups. The first few being a bit hesitant and clumsy. My few year break from ceramics allowed me to return refreshed. This new work is part of a lineage of older vessels but invested with newly excavated dynamism.
Besides the cups, I made some medium serving bowls. I put one of the bowls on my desk with the intent of taking it home to try out with the dinner I was making that night for the solstice. In my wood fired bread oven, I made sourdough pitas and grilled fish and sausages with different vegetable spreads. Everything came from the farmer’s market. I happened to put the bowl next to a copy of The Naked Boy, a graphic novel I spent almost two decades on. I self-published the first three parts from 2009 to 2012. I never published the final part. I had been recently collecting it in an InDesign file to ready it for printing as a full chapter. Where and how I’m still not sure. The cover is a limited edition hand printed block print I did for a show I had at the Boise Art Museum in 2011. I only have a couple of them left. There it was: the same pattern repeated. The stacked lumps on the shell of the giant snapping turtle in the image were exactly the looped lines on the new bowl. It made think about improvisation and buried images.
To improvise needs a storehouse of images. We think of improvisation as coming out of the air “from nowhere”. However, we look at patterns and draw and are drawn to certain kinds of images. I drew that snapping turtle based on looking at many reference photos and remembering the snapping turtles I would see in the pond by my house as a kid. But I knew that I was doing something else in those drawings. Making a notation that suggests the lumpiness of the turtle’s actual pattern. I was going not for verity but visual metaphor. One tendency I know I have as an artist is to work loosely and quickly. As a result, I do everything I can to slow myself down, to hone in on the veracity of a thing knowing full well that a contrary mark making urge is at play. Whenever I try to “be free” and give in to the improvisational it tends to be mawkish and wrongheaded. It is in the resistance that the good stuff surfaces. It’s the opposing forces that squeeze out the energy and magic. It is here where ceramics instructs drawing and drawing instructs ceramics. Directness is energy but directed directness that meets the resistance of material creates fusion. So the looping lines on the bowl, in the print of the snapping turtle or in the passage of a painting is in me and comes from something older than me. It is a way of riding the lines of energy.
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