Ceramics: Night Window/Ocean/Birches/ Western NY Landscape #16-27

all approximately 4" x 5"

ceramic reliefs

A lot of reliefs came out of the kiln and I'm playing catch-up here. My friend, the painter Aaron Brooks, thinks these look surreal. Surreal can mean "dreamlike" or "other-worldly". The artistic movement of Surrealism was begun in 1924 by Andre Breton and most people are familiar with Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory which is wide spread in poster form. If you ever go to see it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City you may be surprised at how small it is (9 1/2" x 13"). I agree with Brooks but I find they have qualities that are difficult to ascertain. [Please excuse the format with all of them up against each other but I couldn't find another way in Blogger. It makes them hard to see.]

I love the color quality I'm able to get using a combination of glazes and under glaze pastels. The glassiness is sparkly like a varnished painting. The imagery is abstracted from nature, varying in degrees. I continue dot play in some, consider texture, and really try to push space both physically in shaping the clay and in the illusionistic painting of it. Most tiles are surface decoration but these approach three-dimensional painting. I'm not interested in the same things as the artist Frank Stella, however, who had a 2007 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in NYC titled "Painting into Architecture". Stella and Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial) received the National Medal of Arts in February presented by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. Artinfo.com says that previous painters who've received the award include Georgia O'Keefe, Jacob Lawrence, Jasper Johns, and Robert Motherwell. I particularly like Lin's piece Wakefield created at the outdoor sculpture center Storm King (near the Hudson in New York State) in 2009 with its small rolling hills relating to the hills of the surrounding landscape. One could say it has surreal qualities. I think my work, although of modest scale and not an on-site earth work, has a connection to it in that way. The mystery of what art is actually doing is the hook that draws us back. I am so glad the United States formally recognizes its importance and acknowledges the contributions of some of its creators.