hrmm...
Whatever you think it looks like!
I would think it is a fantastical thing,
that would last forever. A splattery mix of fun colours and materials. It would
be ugly and joyful at the same time.
Would you like to see one?
I have made a few attempts to make my own
splattery joyful things. What I really want to do is communicate joy. My kind
of joy, because I dont connect with the generic joy you find in advertising. I
want to make people happy. It is not an original concept, but Joy isn't really
just a concept.
I make Ceramic paintings with glaze and
clay effects fired at multiple temepteratures. My palette is freedom. Freedom
from store bought unknown concotions of paint and manufactured limits. Freedom
from traditional ceramic conventions of pots and bowls. I have made a place
where I am free to make anything my imagination leads me to, constantly
exploring fantasy. But not in the cartoon direct sense of fantasy, but the
material possibilities of minerals and elements in powder form from our real
world combining into unknown substances of beauty. Thats my kind of fantasy-
pretty chemistry.
Ceramics is one of the unknown arts, often
ignored by the general public as an art form. Sometimes I agree that its craft
history and traditions influence it to the point that it really is not high
art, but that does not mean it is not possible. Peter Vaulkos, an American
Ceramic Artist of the 1970s, started a revloution when he made plates with
holes in them and put them on the wall. What I make is a link in that growing
chain. I love painting, but the limits I have found in the materials I have
found limitless in ceramics. By hanging my paintings on the wall we can share
in the timeless, eternal abstract expressionist joy of ceramic fantastic
possibilities.
"We should remember that a picture --
before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story -- is
essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a particular
pattern."
--Maurice Denis, Definition of Neotraditionism.
Originally published in Art et Critique in Paris, 23 & 30 August 1890
(This version of the quote translated from
French by Peter Collier for Art In Theory: 1815--1900 edited by Charles Harris,
Paul Wood & Jason Gaiger, page 863.)
