|
I had been painting about seven or eight years when I asked Allen
Hart, my teacher and then director of the Visual Studies Center
of the Greenwich Village Children's Aid Society, if I could volunteer
in the afterschool children's art program. He suggested I take a
minimum wage part time assistant job-but working with a wonderful,
creative clay teacher, Elizabeth Jacobs. I told him I knew nothing
about clay, but he said that didn't matter-I'd learn alongside the
kids in her class.
Elizabeth changed my life-encouraging me and teaching me as I learned
how to teach handbuilding to the kids. Eventually I studied briefly
at the school with Renee Azenaro until circumstances didn't permit
me to take more night classes. I then moved in 1989 to the Crafts
Students League and Vera Lightstone, who has been my ceramics mentor
ever since. Under her tutelage I acquired the techniques and skills
necessary to my own creative explorations in the medium. Eventually
I worked as a monitor and studio assistant in the clay studio before
briefly enjoying the luxury of a studio of my own.
I am primarily a hand builder driven to construct organic vessels
and, more occasionally animal and fish sculptures. Clay, for me,
is a fluid, healing, compelling medium. Both the rigorous demands
and excitement of raku and wood firings intrigue me…though
most of my work by necessity is fired to cone 6 in electric kilns.
Currently, since the demise of the Crafts Students League, I am
looking for a new venue and clay community in which to continue
my work.
|
