About

During the first pandemic year, 2020, I was fortunate enough to be invited to my friends' small ceramic studio in Maine. During that year we worked very hard each day experimenting in clay, making shapes, trying out underglazes, glazes and firing temperatures. And in the process, I began to apply my ideas about painting to three dimensional forms in clay. Applying underglaze colors, washing it off, watching the patterns of the drips and streaks, a pattern repeated over and over again until I found a painted surface I liked. The surface looked accidental, unmanipulated, just traces, reminiscent of a found, object, a scraped or peeled wall.

This became my basic process and to this day, I am still working in the same manner and trying to make bigger, more complex sculptural bodies with experimental painted surfaces. 

Background

I grew up in Amarillo, Texas in the 1940-50s. From an early age I knew I wanted to be an artist but my family didn’t really know much about fine art. I was very fortunate to be encouraged by several teachers from grammar school up though high school. After graduation I left Texas for art school in Chicago. Several years later after graduate school I was very fortunate to be hired at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to catalog a small collection of video tapes called the Video Data Bank which I and my partner, Lyn Blumenthal, built into a very successful collection of over 5000 artist produced videotapes and artist interviews. 

After many, many years of being too busy with my job to paint I finally began painting seriously in 2010. In spite of having an MFA in fine arts I had no idea of how to begin my art practice. I knew lots of information about what I didn’t want in my paintings but no idea of what I did want.

I remember seeing a photo of Ellsworth Kelly in The NY Times Magazine. As I recall he was standing next to a painting on a wall and surrounding the painting were a wall of the drips, smudges, marks that were a by-product of the actual painting. I thought these accidents were as interesting as the flat, solid color paintings themselves. I liked the idea of a painting that looked accidental and spontaneous and this is the idea I started exploring.

I started with some small white solid circles on a blue/black background. After painting them I immediately wanted them to disappear. The next step was the beginning of obliterating these circles by letting the paint to randomly travel through the edges and drip down across the surface and make its own pattern. I became interested in questions like: how do you make tension in a painting surface with minimal interaction with the paint? Just how little can you do to make a painting be a painting? These ideas, of course, have been explored throughout art history but I was looking for an exploration that was personal, coming from a feeling of randomness, emphasizing the freedom of the smeared paint sliding around the canvas. The process is intentionally thoughtless. I felt something intriguing while I watched the paint spread across the canvas with little to no control from me. And I liked the visual effect.

I loved working in oil paint, however in 2019 for several reasons I decided to leave my painting studio in Bushwick. Earlier that year I visited a friend in Mallorca who had a teacher and was learning ceramics. I joined them one afternoon while they were working. I wasn’t particularly interested in ceramics, but, since I no longer had a painting studio, I was looking for a way to keep working so I decided to sign up for a beginning hand building class at Greenwich House in New York. To my great surprise I loved working in clay and I still do.


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