This review appeared in the New York Times on September 7, 2007.

It’s Just Clay, but How About a Little Respect?
by Roberta Smith

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is also the grandmother of that staff of life called art. This is especially clear with ceramics, the medium at which nearly all cultures excel, spurred by the basic need for things in which to carry water, store grain, serve up victuals. From meeting such needs, all else apparently flowed: abstract painting as much as bathroom fixtures. Ceramics has one of the richest histories in the world, more than can be absorbed in a lifetime. We all have our favorites, be it Greek vases or Fiesta ware, Tang courtesans or cookie jars, Edo tea bowls or Southern face jugs, Wedgwood or Russel Wright.

But, perplexingly, the mainstream art world’s appreciation of contemporary ceramics remains a capricious, on-and-off, up-and-down thing — even when, as now, it seems to be in on/up mode. The latest symptom is “Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramic,” a sprawling, ebullient season opener of works by 31 artists at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea.

This show tries to position ceramics in the mainstream by ignoring just about anyone who hasn’t more or less achieved high-end acceptance, a snobbish ploy. “Vessels are so over” is the apparent subtext of this potpourri of the figurative, abstract and installational.

But you have to admire a show that can keep its dignity while ranging from the cool-handed late-Conceptualist Sam Durant (plastic lawn chairs cast in porcelain with delicate chinoiserie glazes) to the neo-Neo-Expressionist Jonathan Meese, with his supposedly wild and crazy busts. The show’s stylistic and physical scope defines ceramics as a commodious, seductive medium with fairly firm limits. But it is also a great leveler of aesthetic differences. And within those limits, it seems as hard to fail as it is to make something that surpasses generic competence and appeal. The frequency of mushy little figures here confirms this. (Ceramics accommodates so many levels of skill that the statement “My 5-year-old could do that” has an unusually high rate of accuracy.)

The elder statesman here is the great Ken Price, whose résumé reads like a flowchart covering the last four decades of ceramics’ shifting fortunes. His bulbous, suggestive undulating blob, aglow with color, presides over the main gallery like a quiet, compact king in a noisy young court. (The bright, variegated patterns of a monster head/flower vase — in papier-mâché rather than clay, and filled with real lilies — by the Swiss art star Urs Fischer could almost be an irreverent hommage to Mr. Price’s fine-pored, jewel-like surface.) Also present is Rebecca Warren, a gifted British sculptor who works almost exclusively in fired clay, picking up where de Kooning’s quivering bronze figures left off.

But this is not a stretch. Both Mr. Price and Ms. Warren are represented by Matthew Marks, another blue-chip Chelsea emporium. Less visible ceramicists do not make the cut, notably Ron Nagle, who is Mr. Price’s contemporary and nearly his equal as an artist, and Kathy Butterly, a younger artist who makes abstractly erotic, decorative hybrid variations on vases and cups. Also overlooked are Lynda Benglis, who took up ceramics more than 10 years ago; Sterling Ruby, a young artist from Los Angeles who wreaks havoc with the medium; Nicole Cherubini; and Beverly Semmes.

The Gladstone effort means business in every sense. It favors artists who fall primarily into one or more of three categories: veterans of foreign biennales; young and hot; represented by the Gladstone organization. It is also a little over half European which always adds luster.

Among the veterans, Thomas Schütte and Rosemarie Trockel, who have done extensive work in ceramics, stand out. Mr. Schütte contributes an eerie monumental severed head of a woman that is the color of blood but not bloody. Even more intriguing is Ms. Trockel’s white-on-white modern daybed with glazed ceramic cushions. Its usual function thwarted, it serves as a pedestal or extended frame for a large black and white photograph of a 19th-century bronze of a black man’s head. The contrasts are unexpected, arbitrary yet inseparable: black and white, academic and modern, art and design, purity and otherness.

Certain artists seem to shine in ceramics, among them Anish Kapoor, who counters his usual sleekness with a striking roughness reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist work of Peter Voulkos. Liz Larner’s large, faceted polygons in unglazed cast porcelain on irregular bases covered with black rubber are among the best things she has ever done. (They start a lively conversation with the Trockel daybed that is joined, from an adjacent gallery, by Manfred Pernice’s white, lecternlike evocation of Giacometti.)

Paloma Varga Weisz’s reticent little figures, usually in carved wood, are stronger in clay with rich, rusty glazes. Like Kai Althoff’s version of a Tang courtesan, they seem presaged by the work of Anne Chu, who weighs in here with life-size figures called Hellish Spirits. Their velvety smoke-fired surfaces live up to the name; they evoke transcultural court jesters and have an affecting psychological presence. In other instances, including works by Mike Kelley and Sarah Lucas, the results are pleasantly routine. (Bo knows ceramics.) So is Elizabeth Peyton’s wax portrait head, conventionally modeled and reminiscent of the British sculptor Jacob Epstein.

The show also includes works by Mary Heilmann, whose abstract paintings have always been paralleled by abstract ceramics, and Andrew Lord, a crossover ceramicist who has been an art world regular since 1981. Here Mr. Lord unveils a courageous new foray, forsaking his sculptural Process Art vessels for pairings of assorted heads, skulls, hands, limbs and more abstract body parts, as well as paintinglike plaques. Overlaps with Jasper Johns, early Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Nauman and Robert Gober are hard to ignore, and create an odd sense of mastery and striving. The sensitive surfaces and grisaille glazes full of shadows, dating back to Mr. Lord’s earliest works, may carry him forward.

The show’s new faces include Klara Kristalova, a Swedish artist, who pushes the tradition of Meissen figurines toward larger scale and decidedly disturbing moments, like the sinking, blindfolded head of a man in “Pond.” The Romanian-born twins Gert and Uwe Tobias make suave assemblages that combine appropriated dishes and vases with ghoulish little hand-made figures to lighthearted effect. A Chicago artist named William O’Brien makes the show’s biggest splash with a crowded tabletop menagerie of objects, mostly vessels, both ceramic and not. Wonderfully off-hand and slovenly in a way that brings to mind doilies and contorted cigar cleaners as much as amateur pottery, the piece owes something to the imposing clusters of vases and pitchers for which Mr. Lord was first known but has its own raucous D.I.Y. energy, and an air of inclusiveness that this show, ambitious as it is, might have taken a little more to heart.

“Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramic” is at the Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 206-9300, through October 13, 2007.

Photos by David Regen. Ken Price photo by Matthew Marks Gallery.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: January 14, 2007, New York Times
Photographs by Takashi Hatakeyama

Pittsburg, Kan.–Jun Kaneko and his assistants cap off the building of his 10-foot-tall head sculptures. These works have become an obsession over the last decade.

For the past couple of years Jun Kaneko, the ceramic artist, has been driving every month from his studio in Omaha, five hours south to a sewer-pipe factory here, called Mission Clay. There, in a pair of beehive kilns from the turn of the last century, he has been making what must be some of the largest ceramic sculptures made, maybe the largest ever made.

They’re Easter Island-like heads, the size of baby rhinos. Or they’re abstract, in hollow shapes like lozenges or lima beans or dumplings — he calls them “Dangos,” which is Japanese for dumplings. Or, in one case, a little like a ship’s billowing sail, each one weighing thousands of pounds and rising up to 13 feet.

The kilns evoke Celtic ruins, like the ones Irish monks lived in 1,000 years ago: circular, nearly 20 feet tall. They have come, some of them over time, to sprout vines and bushes — nature’s whiskers — a sight as odd as that of Mr. Kaneko: stringy-haired; muscular; a gentle, 64-year-old, soft-spoken Japanese-born artist in artsy black clothes, who looks a little like a dumpling himself, smack in the middle of prairie country. There, at a muddy old brick factory, he makes art among men in hard hats hauling sewer pipes on forklifts.

One blustery morning in December, while the two of us headed back north from the plant, past endless rolling farmland, he related the following story, more or less apropos of nothing:

In September 1959, when he was 17, the strongest typhoon ever to hit Japan struck Nagoya, where his family lived. It was the middle of the night, and thousands of people, caught in their sleep, died within minutes.

“Did you ever hear of a tatami mat?” he asked. “Well, they float.”

I needed a second to grasp the point. The water rose so quickly that people sleeping on the mats found themselves crushed against their own ceilings and drowned. Below sea level, the Kanekos’ neighborhood consisted mostly of old wood houses, which collapsed, but the Kanekos’ modest house happened to be concrete, and the family was able to scramble to a small room on the second floor before the water overtook the first one. “There were fish swimming in the living room,” Mr. Kaneko remembered.

The water rose to just below the second-floor windowsill. “And for some reason I decided to stick my hand out the window, into the water,” he continued. “Suddenly — it was pitch black so I couldn’t see anything — somebody grabbed my hand.”

He pulled. His father, finding a body dragged inside, rushed to the window, stuck his own hand out, and another drowning body latched onto him. “We kept sticking out our hands and pulling them in,” Mr. Kaneko said. Altogether they fished 36 strangers from death, later fashioning a raft from debris to go get supplies, and eventually boarding everyone in the house for two months.

He paused. “Maybe that helped me come to the United States, because after that I wasn’t afraid of too much.” But of course he didn’t just come to the United States. He ended up in the wide-open middle of the Midwest, as far away from the ocean as possible.

A few days earlier, on a clear blue afternoon, Mr. Kaneko; his wife, Ree Schonlau; and I crunched through broken wood and glass in the huge light-flooded upper floor of a defunct Plymouth dealership with magnificent wraparound views of downtown Omaha. Ms. Schonlau, a cheerful Pied Piper with a mop of hair and a habit of calling everyone “dear,” founded the nonprofit Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts here around 25 years ago. Since then it has helped revive downtown and made her a local hero.

Mr. Kaneko and she are classic opposites, introvert and extrovert. Bemis first brought Mr. Kaneko to work at the Omaha Brickworks in the early ’80s. Recently they bought this dealership as storage for his art, which they’ve been accumulating. There are now plans for a nonprofit center for creative studies, called Kaneko, which will house 2,000 of his sculptures along with works by other artists. They also have bought a former heating and cooling supplier’s warehouse across the street from the dealership. That makes seven big buildings around town that they own, including his studio.

I asked how much room this adds up to, and they needed to stop and calculate.

“About 165,000 square feet,” Ms. Schonlau said.

That’s 12 times the size of the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall, or 6 times as large as all the galleries at the Whitney. Space is clearly another reason Mr. Kaneko settled in Omaha, not Manhattan or San Francisco.

A rare sixth-generation Japanese Christian, descended from missionaries with samurai roots (the combination is another rarity), he moved from Nagoya to Los Angeles to study painting in 1963, with little money, few contacts and barely a word of English. It took him hours to decipher the labels in the supermarket.

Now — it’s a good example of how art careers flourish outside New York — he has a dozen dealers around the country, pressing him for new work. Between gallery shows (he is committed to six different ones every year), museum exhibitions (on average three, he says) and public commissions (for convention centers, airports, subway stations), he keeps four full-time assistants busy. Ms. Schonlau and her two daughters help oversee the finances, which have become formidable. Mr. Kaneko says he pays no attention to that side of things. The sculptures he’s making in Pittsburg, which will cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars, have no prospective buyer.

By the time he arrived in California in the early ’60s, a revolution in ceramics had already begun. Inspired by the Abstract Expressionists, artists like Peter Voulkos, Kenneth Price, Billy Al Bengston, Henry Takemoto, Jerry Rothman and Paul Soldner were making complex sculptures, rejecting traditional ceramic craft and function, pushing toward abstraction and a new ambition of scale.

Using the Omaha Brickworks’ beehive kilns in the ’80s Mr. Kaneko began making his first “Dangos”: hollow-cast sculptures, then up to eight feet high, shaped into soft triangles standing on point or lumpy mounds, gaily glazed with stripes, spirals or dots. Through trial and error, he developed his own techniques for glazes, a subtle variety of colors that kept painting, his first love, integral to his sculptures. By the early ’90s, at the invitation of Bryan Vansell, the manager of Mission Clay, he was experimenting with 11-foot-tall Dangos at the company’s site in Fremont, Calif.

For Mission Clay this represented an enlightened way to use idle kilns. For Mr. Kaneko it represented a three-year immersion. He brought along three assistants from Omaha, set up a tent village at the factory with showers and he even hired a cook.

The first huge Dangos developed cracks: months of work down the drain. Then things got worse. A virus left Mr. Kaneko unable to walk without tumbling over. Half his face was palsied, and he became so sensitive to sound that he couldn’t bear to hear a door close. To glaze the sculptures he taped the palsied eyelid open, so that he could keep his depth perception, and clung on to a tall ladder for dear life.

But, as he said, there was danger and there was danger.

We toured the studio, which occupies a former industrial building at the Old Market. In a drying room two giant heads nestled under a wood and plastic canopy, like lovers at a wedding altar. Bunches of fired pink, white and gray Dangos, not yet glazed, lined the walls, incubating like the creatures in “Aliens.” Immaculate shelves for colored glazes rose before neatly stacked bags of clay, dozens of them. Mr. Kaneko said there were 200 more tons of clay in a building across the street. Upstairs a painting studio the size of a hockey rink had a suite of half-finished striped paintings on the walls, intended for a convention center.

“I like the idea of ambient space, the challenge of it,” he said. “People going through a plaza or a convention center may not be conscious of my pieces and may not be interested in art, — but in the end they are experiencing it. And each public project has its own needs, its own ‘ma,’ ” he said, ma meaning “spirit,” a Shinto idea, which applies, he said, also to the spaces around, and in between, the sculptures.

The drive to Pittsburg was through rain and mist, along slumbering fields. Mr. Kaneko said he enjoys the solitude and never turns on the radio. We gradually fell into conversation about his collaboration with Mission Clay. “The common denominator is our work ethic,” he said. “There was a lot of suspicion that an artist is somebody who cuts off his ear and attacks the secretary, but then they realized that we have the same interests. A lot of my work involves planning, strategy, management. With ceramics you have to be prepared because after a piece is fired, it’s too late to change.”

This led him to talk about industrial ceramics, the Space Shuttle, the temperature at which sewer pipes are fired in a kiln and the delicacy of glazes. I stared at flocks of Canada goose gliding over barren trees and past tiny patches of snow clinging to the sides of creeks and to the shoulder of the highway. After several hours we pulled into downtown Fort Scott (“Birthplace of Gordon Parks” the road sign advertises), a hillside grid of cement and brick buildings partly duded up as an Old West town, where we settled into plates of greasy enchiladas at a Mexican restaurant under a riot of paper flags and Christmas wreaths.

I mentioned that back in his studio Mr. Kaneko had caressed a couple of the striped, half-finished heads as if he were petting them. Smooth and rounded with flat, impassive features, or sometimes without any features at all, his heads have become an obsession over the last decade. “I made 10 of them, which sat in the studio where I looked at them for about five years. Then I started to pair them because the pairs created conversations.”

How does he decide which get stripes or dots? “I don’t know how it happens, but over the months they will speak to me: ‘I want a polka dot.’ Or whatever.” The critic Arthur Danto has compared the results to colorful kimonos on sumo wrestlers: joyful patterns lightening hulking forms.

We reached the plant, past several forlorn malls, and hopped through a muddy parking lot where wood palettes were stacked with huge ceramic pipes. Inside, the place was quiet, dark and mostly empty. Numbered pairs of barnlike doors designated different drying rooms, the first of which was Mr. Kaneko’s. Dozens of his Dangos, bisque-fired, huddled like dinosaur eggs. Some were cracked; he said he was hoping to salvage these by incorporating the cracks as decorative elements, an approach he related to the Zen concept of Sabi, the embracing of flaws.

Wandering through the plant I unlatched a pair of double doors to a different drying room and was stopped short. In the dim light was a Greek temple: rows of standing sewer pipes, 13 feet high, each nearly 4 feet wide, belled at the top like Doric columns, stretching toward infinity.

Down a long corridor opening to the outdoors, the rounded kilns sat in rows like eggs in an egg carton: a village of beehive huts. In the first of them Mr. Kaneko and his assistants had shoehorned several 13-foot-high Dangos, closely packed together. In the second kiln immense heads, wrapped in plastic, faced off nose to nose.

I heard what sounded like church bells. Outside, several plant workers were unloading another kiln, checking for cracks in sewer pipes by gently tapping them with hammers. Their clanks mixed with the hum of engines and with a few passing train whistles.

Tom Harter, the plant manager, happened by. A rangy, bespectacled man with a hangdog expression, he told me about the factory (which he said had fallen on hard times in the ’70 s, when plastic temporarily displaced ceramic) and about his regard for Mr. Kaneko. “A lot of people have concepts and creativity, but to combine them with management ability is exceptional,” he said.

Back in the drying room, with a Japanese brush in hand, Mr. Kaneko was dragging over a ladder to begin glazing the surface of a nine-foot Dango, top to bottom. The process was hypnotic, the room silent and still save for the slight buzz of a heater. Gradually the sculpture gained a velvety, matte coat.

That evening in the plain, furnished cottage he rents for himself and his assistants (shag carpeting, overhead lights, ceiling fans), he made baked catfish in parchment, with pasta and asparagus. It seemed about the most ambitious dinner somebody could devise with ingredients from the local Wal-Mart.

The cottage was intimate, warmed by food and conversation, far away from the big empty spaces he keeps populating with his brightly colored sculptures, as if he felt compelled to fill a void. “Scale has its own power,” he said. “An unsuccessful big piece can still cause people to say, ‘Wow!’ And although that’s the last thing I want, just to make people say ‘Wow,’ I do expect you to look at big things differently. Small pieces you can turn around in your hand, you can look down at. Big pieces you have to look up at. It’s the difference between looking at a flower or up at a tall tree or at a mountain.”

He thought for a moment: “I like pieces that I have to look up to.”

The following review appeared in the New York Times on Friday, January 12,2007.

Fun With Studio Crafts: When the Traditional Gets Quirky

By GRACE GLUECK

Who but the California funk ceramicist Robert Arneson (1930-92) could turn the mother of the 16th-century painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer from a figure of pathos into a witty incarnation of worldly wisdom? His satirical take on the dour 1514 drawing by Dürer is but one of the quirky, provocative, funny and sometimes gorgeous things to be found in “One of a Kind: The Studio Craft Movement,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Studio craft refers to the post-World War II development of artist-craftspeople who not only conceive and design their own objects but have a direct hand in making them. Ruth Duckworth, Wharton Esherick, Sheila Hicks, Harvey K. Littleton, Sam Maloof, Ron Nagle, Magdalene Odundo, Albert Paley, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos are among those whose work appears here. The show, the first in some time of the Met’s periodic contemporary design exhibitions devoted to the studio crafts movement, is intended to reveal the breadth of the museum’s collection in the field.

Jane Adlin, associate curator in the Met’s 19th-century, modern and contemporary art department, has chosen about 50 pieces of furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, jewelry and fiber from the museum’s collection, which includes Mr. Arneson’s 1979 bust of glazed earthenware, “Mother Dürer.” It presents Dürer’s mother as a sharp-nosed, world-weary German frau looking wryly out at life from under a decorous wimple.

Mr. Arneson is not the show’s only humorist. John Cederquist, who has his way with wood, weighs in with “Little Wave” (1990-91), an elegant cabinet concealed behind a trompe l’oeil door painted and veneered to look like a battered wooden packing case with a rowdy wave tearing through it. The wave is a sendup of the one familiar from Hokusai’s “Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji.” Richard Marquis’s “American Acid Capsule With Cloth Container” (1969-70), a blown-up, capsule-style pill made from red, white and blue leftovers at a Murano glass factory, plays sardonically off Vietnam-era political issues like free speech, flag burning and antiwar protests.

While gravitating toward abstract and sculptural art, the studio craft movement has developed ways of working with nontraditional methods and materials, including some once available only for factory use. Electroforming, for example, an industrial process that deposits metals on other materials by means of a solution that conducts electricity, is now used in studio settings to produce effects not always achievable by traditional means. Michael Glancy’s “Melding Impetus” (1994), for example, uses this process to fuse copper and gold leaf with blown and industrial plate glass, creating a free-form pattern of gold and copper on an elegant vase of pinkish and colorless transparency, as well as the two pieces of plate glass it sits on.

Glass is one of the most interesting and versatile materials in contemporary studio crafts. Its use has been much extended since Mr. Littleton, a founder of the studio glass movement, began in the early 1960s to explore the possibilities of hot glassmaking in a studio rather than a factory. He is represented here by “Amber Crested Form” (1976), created by placing a big blob of hot, transparent glass on an assemblage that included a hollow tube. He used gravity and the tension created by cooling glass to manipulate the piece into a dolphinlike shape.

On a quite different wavelength is “Suspended Artifact” (1993), another glass work by a younger practitioner, William Morris. Known for his series of glass art shaped like bones and other artifacts, Mr. Morris here has vertically pinioned a tusk-shaped piece of glass to a glass vessel, using a glass rod that runs through both the tusk and the vessel’s handles. Black silhouetted figures, presumably inspired by prehistoric wall drawings, appear on the vessel’s sides. It’s a studio production that almost looks like an ancient artifact.

The show also includes tapestries with new and clever variations on an ancient form. Inspired by the sight of snow piled high on the roofs of houses in Normandy, Ms. Hicks’s “Linen Lean-To” (1967-68) is a wall hanging in bold relief, in which overlapping thick tassels made from bleached linen thread create the effect of a thick carpet of the white stuff.

Olga de Amaral’s “Umbra 30” (2003) combines linen with silver leaf and paint in a woven wall of deep blue and silver strips that evoke the rivers and waterfalls of her native Colombia. And in Jon Eric Riis’s “Kiss the Prince,” a fetching bolero-style jacket woven of silk and metallic threads is patterned with circles of varying sizes made of tiny seed pearl and coral beads. Against this background large green frogs appear, swimming vainly toward the neck of the garment, which may have been designed for a princess.

Joan Livingstone’s “Spine” (1995), another three-dimensional fiber piece, is composed of handmade felt stiffened with resin and sewn with suture thread. Knotted and pulled lengthwise, the piece (it is hung horizontally) could almost be taken for a tense human backbone, albeit one on steroids.

Traditionalists have their place in this show as well. Esherick (1887-1970), a studio craft pioneer, is represented by “Music Stand” (1962), an elegantly simple frame of cherry wood crossbars supported on three curving legs. Mr. Maloof’s “Settee #3/87” (1987), in richly grained tiger maple and ebony, has a classic plain shape, with slight tweaking of the double chair as stripped down by Shaker furnituremakers.

The master of metal work, Mr. Paley, appears here in top form with “Push Plate” (1981), a dashing Belle Époque-style revolving door attachment in cast bronze, part of an elaborate design for the interior of a Southern restaurant.

Attention must also be paid to the seemingly old-fashioned work of Bonnie Seeman, whose dainty ceramic “Coffeepot and Tray” (2003), with its mock cabbage leaves and rhubarb stalks, evokes the genteel tradition of 18th-century British and continental china. Its shape also suggests the head, shoulders and bodice of a neatly dressed Victorian lady. But with a closer look the vegetation can be read as human tissue, with the rhubarb stalks cut to resemble spongy bone ends and seeds evoking red blood cells, giving it a modern touch of the macabre.

All told, this comes off as one of the liveliest shows of this field that the Met has put up in recent years.

“One of a Kind: The Studio Craft Movement” continues through Sept. 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 570-3949 or metmuseum.org.

One of a Kind: The Studio Craft Movement
December 22, 2006–September 3, 2007
Modern Design and Architecture Gallery, Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, 1st floor
The studio craft movement developed in the United States during the post–World War II years. By the 1970s in both Europe and the United States, a shifting political climate and an “anything goes” art scene encouraged a new freedom of artistic expression. Artists working with traditional materials began to experiment with new materials and techniques, producing bold, abstract, and sculptural art. This exhibition of approximately 50 works from the Metropolitan’s collection includes furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, jewelry, and fiber.

Peter Callas: Sculpture at the Edge by Dorothy Joiner is published in the current issue of
Ceramics Monthly.
In 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, southwest of Paris, near the Epte River, a tributary of the Seine. There he created a plein-air (open-air) studio where he painted for more than four decades until his death in 1926. He hung Japanese prints wall to wall in his house, planted color-saturated flowers in parallel rows of the Clos Normand (Cottage Garden), fashioned an Oriental water garden lined with weeping willows, and had gardeners rake the water lilies into patterns on his pond. He thereby fashioned an ambience in which the Japanese aesthetic and a profound love of nature were interwoven. Drawn from these sources, Monet’s later work at Giverny is now seen as a forerunner of twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism.

Sharing the French painter’s predilection for the Asian sensibility and his passion for the natural world, American ceramist Peter Callas offers an intriguing analogue to Monet. Callas has lived for the past twenty years on three acres in New Jersey in an 1812 German Moravian farmhouse on the Pequest River. His home is in the midst of a radiant, blossom-filled garden bathed with a dappled light. Wildflowers line the river running through his property, inviting the occasional visit of a blue heron. A botanical arboretum with an Asian flair boasts rare species, chosen for their varied hues. Nearby, a 50-acre orchard supplies peaches and apples. These Edenesque surroundings, together with extensive travel and study both at home and abroad—Europe, Australia, South America, Asia and particularly Japan—have informed Callas’ work for the past thirty years. Combining these influences with a very American dynamism, he is now making large-scale sculptures that reflect the past at the same time that they plunge ahead into an energetic expressionism. “Where there is no passion,” he asserts, “there is no backbone.”

For Callas, life in his own exquisite setting is exhilarating. A self-proclaimed “horticulture bug,” he tends flower beds boasting over 200 varieties, spies on root systems, and notes colors and textures, the strengths of tree trunks, and the marvelous vitality of swelling buds. Callas’ empathy with nature parallels that of the Japanese, whose animistic Shinto traditions hold that spirits inhabit the natural world—mountains, trees, rocks—lending these a numinous quality. This reverence for natural phenomena fosters in turn a heightened awareness of and respect for color, texture, design and material. Nature for the Asian is less a juxtaposition of objects than a hallowed field of energies.

Callas’ impassioned identification with nature, which simultaneously destroys and regenerates, leads him, like his Japanese counterparts, to eschew Western “perfection” in favor of surfaces that are deliberately coarsened and shapes that deny the symmetrical and the concentric. He prefers, instead, forms that are gnarled, wrenched and warped, evoking nature’s raw, transformative powers and breathtaking splendor.

Also allying Callas to both Japanese traditions and to natural processes is his commitment to wood firing, almost universally recognized as aleatory and edgy. But, according to Callas, the rewards are at the edge. Admittedly anachronistic and downright inefficient, wood firing nonetheless produces a timeless beauty, and seemingly “accidental” glazes resulting from the interaction of clay, ash and atmosphere. Difficult to control and apparently fortuitous, these glazes effect a wide range of textures and colors. In a wood-fired kiln, the artist can harness and reproduce, as it were, the earth’s fiery diurnal processes, those millennial metamorphoses that erupt as volcanoes. Just as clay undergoes a physical transformation in the kiln, so do the earth’s tectonic plates change chemically as they cast against each other and are subjected to intense, prolonged heat cycles. “Wood firing,” he says, “is high drama, a powerful metaphor of nature.”

After having earned international recognition for vases, double-necked vessels, flasks, platters and ceremonial tea wares, Callas has, during the past decade, focused on nonfigurative sculpture. Bringing to this medium his characteristic gestural energy, he fashions plurifacial, tuberous configurations rising out of stable, yet fluid bases that harmonize the rough, smooth and sharp. Swirling masses of molten material are solidified, gouged and scored, calling attention to the malleable quality of the clay itself. Concavities often jagged, sometimes more regular, intimate the sombrous mystery of caves. Holes, reminiscent of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, reveal a concern for the void, connecting, in Moore’s words, “one side with the other,” resulting in greater three-dimensionality. Slabs branch out from the core, extending into space, as though denying restrictive contours, underscoring the subtle tension between mass and border. Other passages, like double images, hint at the animate, perhaps the features of a human visage or the outline of an animal face. In a deep, resonant palette due to the elevated temperatures of the firing, the pieces range from grayed blues to more roseate colorations.

The parallels to Callas’ “wrenched” and “eroded” aesthetic are provocative: Monet’s late dreamlike, almost calligraphic natural forms; and the nonfigurative, gestural paintings of the Abstract Expressionists during the ’50s. These painters believed that art’s ability to embody human experience is independent of representation. Art divorced from description could, they declared, convey universal, very human themes. Committed to vestigial shapes, abstract arabesques and cascading lines, they saw the canvas, in the words of Harold Rosenberg, as “an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined.” They maintained, furthermore, that the very intensity of their “action” touched and, in a way, harnessed those dynamic, and largely unconscious, archetypal forces controlling the outside world as well as the human psyche. Their skills finely honed with years of practice, the “action” painters were thus able to temper freedom with control, inspiration with discipline. Translating a similar vitality into clay, Callas makes sculptures that intersect nature’s accidental, divergent side—those characteristics favored by the Asian mind.

Photos:
top, “Zao,” 36 in. (91 cm) in height, slab-built stoneware, once-fired in an anagama, with natural glaze, 1994.

bottom, “Exodus,” 36 in. (91 cm) in height, slab-built stoneware, once-fi red in an anagama, with natural glaze, 1999, by Peter Callas, Belvidere, New Jersey.

Photo credits: Craig Phillips, Brett Szemple

The following article appeared in Ceramics Art and Perception, #63.

Article by Patricia Pelehach

“But that is simply impossible,” sputtered the visitor, a distinguished and accomplished potter.

“Yes, it is,” replied Paul Chaleff. “Almost.” Noticing my gape-mouthed, bug-eyed response to his enormous and marvellous Large Free Form, Chaleff, with his usual self-deprecating charm, told the anecdote above, to let me know that I was not the firstto react to his new work with breathless befuddlement. While I attempted to collect my wits and, more importantly, deflect the artist’s attention away from the fact that I was now caressing the sculpture’s invitingly tactile surface, Chaleff told me that this monumental form – more than 2 m (6 ft) in height and in length – was originally a fist-sized maquette, hacked with a hatchet from a raw lump of clay. Once the artist had a shape that spoke to him, he commenced
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