Arthur Gonzalez

Arthur Gonzalez’s profile on Ceramics Now Magazine – View his works

Dark, somber and foreboding, Arthur Gonzalez’s works encourage serious deliberation and reflection on the relationship between personal concerns and world issues. Raw in form, lacking in smoothness and rough in finish, the ceramic sculptures give glimpses of a conversation or a contemplation in progress. Gonzalez’s creations of ceramic and found objects reveal visions and feelings that are not polished but ongoing processes of gyrating thoughts and churning emotions that threaten to erupt into reality and consciousness to defy the fantasy of a peaceful experience.

Aesthetically, his work balances between painting and sculpture, clay figures with blown glass, and horsehair and natural sponges. The understanding that these elements are not “found objects” or even mixed media but closer to the ideas of “material” by Joseph Beays. The figures are a devise to trigger our need to see “narrative” which is a support system for the symbols and the material. These pieces are constructed in such a manner that some pieces are literally and metaphorically in balance with a degree of fulcrum-like equation. Consequently, there is a symbiotic relationship, the sculpture becomes a metaphor for the dialogue and the dialogue is ushered in by the sculpture.

Arthur Gonzalez received his MFA degree at the University of California at Davis. He studied under Robert Arneson. Manuel Neri and Wayne Thiebaud. He is an internationally exhibited artist with over 35 one-person shows in the last 25 years. He has received many awards, including two Virginia Groot Foundation awards,and an unprecedented four-time recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts award. He is a tenured professor at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, He also has been awarded many residencies including the Pilchuck Glass School, and the Tainan University of Art in Taiwan. Gonzalez advises his students to rid themselves of the process normally associated with ceramics, get past things that are supposedly bad technique (like epoxy in cracks), colve problems creatively and remember spirit when making work.