my life with clay
I’m a relative latecomer to the world of ceramics. Throughout my life I’ve been involved in the arts, interested in art history and design but when it came to the beauty of ceramics I was entirely a voyeur.
In reality that is not such a bad thing, and as it happened, I was lucky enough to grow up in Northern California at a time when just watching the ceramics community was still a huge education. I babysat for the family that lived next door to Robert Arneson and remember when John Natsoulas opened one of the first galleries in Davis. Later as an undergraduate I studied in schools where David Kuaoka and Clayton Bailey taught. When my mother moved to Berkeley CA, her neighbors were Gary Holt and Mary Law.
Throughout all of this my interest in ceramics remained purely academic. I liked the art history of it all; I liked knowing how various movements came into play, which artists learned and worked together and which ones worked apart; I loved reading about what keeps art part of a dynamic process. But I remained uninterested in the process.
It wasn’t until after I moved to New York to attend graduate school at Pratt Institute, actually it wasn’t until many years after that, that I began to really appreciate the ceramics artists that had been so familiar to me in my youth.
Even so it was another few years until circumstances brought me back to the bay area and I began to work with clay myself. Turns out that I love working with clay, it’s been a great joy and one of the things that keeps me motivated about living in the Bay Area.