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 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, California. Later as an undergraduate I studied in schools where David Kuraoka 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 actual practice.
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 pottery as an art form and to value the ceramics artists that had been so familiar to me in my youth.
Even so it was another few years until circumstances presented me with a chance to work with clay myself and although I am still developing my artistic voice I love it.