Artist Inspired

Artist Statement

For the Artist Inspired Assignment, we were tasked with researching an artist of our choice, and then creating a piece based on either their work or the themes they worked with. The artist I choose is Jonathan Christenson Caballero. For more information see my slideshow here. The subject I choose to create is a hat with a landscape painted on top. I used the glazes: PC-41, C-47 for the mountains, C-21, SM-21, SM-29 for the ocean, and SM-44, C-41 for the flower. 

The work is arranged so that the clay itself is more of a vessel for a story, rather than the focal point of the piece. The hat is very simple by design, but it’s the detailed glaze work that makes it interesting to look at. My project evolved a lot, from making sketches of different ideas to the ambition of trying to make a lot of hats. I eventually just ended up with the one which I like. The texture of the piece I really like because I feel that it is brought out by the color scheme. I spend a lot of time trying to decide on a color scheme. I didn’t want them to be distracting and not allow for the simplicity of the piece to come through. I feel like they are fairly well tied together, and some of the glazes even have an unexpected physical texture to them which I found interesting and unexpected.

As I mentioned, I was inspired by Jonathan Caballero. His pieces have very clear themes of immigration, the working class, labor, and the American Dream. I wanted to follow a similar vein and went with the idea of a hat being sometimes one of the few things an immigrant might carry into this new country. I took the idea of the hat and added the story to it, imagining all that it might have seen along the way, or all its owner might have been hoping for in America or whatever new country they are arriving at. I am most proud of the way the color allows the setting to unfold on the surface of the hat. Jonathan Caballero uses a lot of symbolism in his work, which is partly why I wanted my piece to be so symbolism based. I think my work could be stronger in the precision of the glaze job. I really like it for the most part, but some of the places where two glazes meet are bare, which I didn’t realize would happen. For my next glaze job I want to be more precise with that edge and ensure that the whole thing gets covered. I also want to experiment with layer glazes because I wonder what colors and textures that could produce.