Robert Brady almost missed becoming an artist. He grew up in Reno, Nevada, as part of a nomadic family, all of whom, at one time or another, worked in the gambling casinos. With no higher aspiration that being a "pit boss,” he began his senior year of high school and found himself in a crafts class. The harried crafts teacher directed him to make a pitcher. Brady does not recall getting any instruction in this unfamiliar task. Nevertheless, he produced a slab-built clay pitcher within the fifty-minute period and became hooked on ceremonies. The teacher later helped him secure the scholarship for art school that changed his life.
Hard to Class
Today, Brady creates ceramic sculpture that resists even the most determined attempts at morphological classification. The frontal stance, simplified form, and attenuated appendages of one of his human/animal figures might suggest a tribal primitive source - perhaps the haunting carved wood figures from the Caroline Islands. Yet the bright, Neo-Expressionist polychrome colors of the same piece bring its painterly reference squarely into the Modernist era.
Throughout his fifteen-year career, Brady has produced large totemic vessel forms; a series of modular abstract sculptures based on the grid; numerous masks, wall-mounted heads, and torsos; and an impressive variety of freestanding sculptures. For several years the human figure has been the most dominant motif, but Brady's restless creativity makes easy cataloging of his work impossible. His sculptures have a way of evoking the viewer's empathy, arousing an array of emotions that make their content as complex and varied as their visual appearance. No one will ever accuse him of opting for a signature style or a flashy technique that settles neatly into a predictable formula. In fact, diversity achieved by modest means is what separates him from many of his contemporaries in the ceramic field, some of whom have built reputations by perfecting a complicated ceramic process or concentrating on a single form of expression.
At forty-two, Brady belongs to that generation of ceramists who came of age in the aftermath of Peter Voulkos' revolutionary assault on the craft of pottery, which expanded the functional, decorative media to encompass abstract sculpture, nonfunctional vessels, and an array of fine art techniques. When Brady entered Oakland's California College of Arts and Crafts in 1964, ceramic sculpture was the newest, noisiest kid in college art departments and was beginning to vie for space in galleries and museums alongside more traditional sculpture. Within ten years its innovations included Robert Arneson's funky clay type writers and toilets, John Mason's monumental minimal sculpture, and Richard Shaw's trompe l'oeil ceramics made from molds, to name only a few.
Somehow Brady managed to avoid overt influences from his peers and teachers, as well as the stylistic extremes that might have codified his early work and restricted its breadth. He first saw Voulkos' sculptural vessels in the 1967 exhibit Abstract Expressionist Ceramics, where he was profoundly moved by their direct, spontaneous execution and strong emotional appeal. But he didn't feel compelled to adopt Voulkos' method of slashing, distorting, and reconstructing pots. Instead, he determinedly set out to master every ceramic technique, from hand building to wheel throwing. At one point, after graduation, he even produced functional pottery as his
...
Read Full Article
|
