Published: April 16, 2008 09:45 pm            

Thought-provoking ceramic artist hopes to transport people

TERRE HAUTE — Visualize walking down Terre Haute’s Arts Corridor on South Seventh Street, and as you pass the Halcyon Gallery, your eyes become attracted by the high gloss blue luster of a waist-high ceramic vessel simultaneously resembling cutting-edge 21st artwork and a priceless historic artifact that has made its way into the window via FedEx time travel from ancient Greece.

The longer you gaze upon this vessel, the more captivating its textured hues of slightly shimmering blue. A few recognizable images can be perceived in the azure neck of the vase: is that a star, an asterisk mark? Then your eyes scan down the vase’s side until momentarily fixing on a vaguely triangular form floating in an undulating navy blue pool of color where you discern squiggling wavelike images that transport your focus up into a cerulean blue sky, where there glitters a fluttering figure that might be a kite if it didn’t also suggest a cursive swirl of Cyrillic lettering.

Are you having a religious experience or a seizure? Did somebody slip a tab of LSD into your morning coffee while you read the newspaper?

Welcome into the beguilingly nebulous world of ceramic artist Dick Hay, who retired from the faculty of Indiana State University in 2006 and now holds the title there of professor emeritus of art. From late August through late September, an exhibition of some of his life’s work will be presented at the Halcyon Gallery.

The exhibition also will be the background setting for an educational film, “The Spirit of the Artist,” about Hay’s career as a ceramic artist. The film is being produced by independent film maker Judy Kelly for national distribution to libraries and college and high-school art departments.

Hay says that he was completely surprised when Kelly made her initial phone call to him regarding the possibility he might be the subject of one of her films. Somebody on the advisory committee of her Texas-based film company who was familiar with Hay’s ceramic art had suggested him as a subject. During their initial conversation, Kelly told Hay that her prospective story line for the film was to open with her strolling down a city street with a film crew and becoming intrigued by lights inside an art gallery. She drops in to see what’s happening and finds herself in an atmosphere of wine, punch and Hay’s artwork. By fortunate coincidence, not long before the film producer called him, Hay had already agreed to have a showing of his ceramic work at the Halcyon Gallery. The film producer is now in the process of conducting interviews with some of Hay’s former art students who will provide background on his life and work.

One of the ironies of Hay’s life is that although he has a worldwide reputation as one of the foremost contemporary ceramic artists, he has always been relatively unknown in the Wabash Valley (he lives in rural Brazil) except by local artists and art students. His ceramic work has been sold in galleries and displayed in museums as far-flung as Moscow, Lithuania, Spain, Japan, Korea, and all across the United States. He has also given more than a hundred college lectures in Europe, Asia and the United States.

“Only rarely have I shown my work around Terre Haute except on the campus,” acknowledges Hay. “Several times I have been requested by the school to make a vessel that can be given as a departing gift to an ISU administrator. Recently I made one for Lloyd Benjamin, the outgoing president.”

“The college was been an excellent place for me to develop as an artist. The university let me create my own situation. When I first came here in the Sixties, I thought I’d stay a year and leave. I ended up staying for 40 years and have no regrets. I’ve turned down a number of other opportunities around the country to have a teaching post. I’ll have to admit, I was a little tempted when I got an offer in Hawaii.”

Hay grew up in Maine and Ohio. “My parents got me started in art quite simply,” he recalls, “They gave me a box of crayons, and I’ve never stopped making art. Fortunately, they never tried to discipline my inclinations, get me to be like everybody else — repressed.”

When Hay entered Ohio University to begin work on his undergraduate degree, his goal was to become a high-school art teacher. Part of the art education curriculum required that he take a course in ceramics. As fate would have it, during his sophomore year he enrolled in a class taught by professor Henry Lin, a master potter who had immigrated to the United States from China. (Lin’s daughter, Maya Lin, later was the architect for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. As an undergraduate, Hay often did babysitting with Maya at the Lin home.)

“I loved everything about professor Lin’s class,” said Hay, “and especially working with clay, which is really nothing but high quality dirt. I learned right away that clay is quiet. I could squeeze it in my hands and could work with it using simple things found in a kitchen drawer like a knife and a sponge. Human beings have been using clay for pottery and ceramic sculptures for 40,000 years. I liked being linked to such history.

“I also became fascinated in college by the effects on ceramic colors when the clay was placed in large kilns. After being subjected to the high temperatures, one color could be transformed into hundreds of shades. It was almost magical. At the time, even as I took all the credit for the beauty of the glazes coming out of the kiln, I felt that it was not me who had created all the color — it seemed there was a God in the flames of the kiln that actually decided how my finished work would look.

“Now as a mature artist, I have learned how to control the process, and I work with lower heats and know almost exactly how the color will look after I put something in the kiln. Yet, there is always an element of surprise when I take a work of ceramic art out of the kiln.

“After I had been in professor Lin’s ceramics class for two months, I forgot about ever wanting to be a high-school teacher. I wanted to work with him and devote my education to ceramics even though I had no idea where I was headed in life. Most troubling to my parents, I had no idea if I could find a livelihood as a ceramic artist.”

From Ohio University, Hay went to Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics, where he received a master of fine arts degree in 1966.

Since Hay has settled in the Wabash Valley, hundreds of his former ISU students have gone on to have celebrated careers as ceramicists and high-school teachers and college professors with positions at universities all around the world. The National Council for Ceramic Art has rated ISU as having one of the 10 best ceramic art schools in the United States.

One of Hay’s former students from the 1970s, Chicago impresario Mark Lyman, now promotes one of the art world’s biggest events. His Sculpture Objects and Functional Art Exposition is staged annually at the 100,000-square-foot Navy Pier in Chicago. More than 30,000 visitors attend the show each year and pay prices up to $200,000 for some of the displayed sculptures.

While Hay was actively teaching, he always took his students to the SOFA expo and introduced them to Lyman. During the get-togethers, Hay always enjoyed telling a story about Lyman’s most memorable ceramic art presentation as a graduate student: “One semester everybody but Lyman showed their work on a table in an art department building. When it came Lyman’s turn, he led us all outside to the parking lot where he had an old clunker pickup that had its windshield wipers outfitted with ceramic art sculptures; in the truck’s bed there was a four-post rack strung with wire. All sorts of ceramic art in shapes never seen before dangled from the wire by strings. When Lyman turned on his truck to show off his wipers, it ran out of gas!

“Lyman’s attitude is one all of you students should have. He was out there on a limb, and he’d get out there far enough that it’d break off. And he’d climb back up, and it’d break off again — you don’t learn anything until you fall on your ass. Lyman dared to be different and even weird but not for shock value. There was thought and purpose behind his eccentric actions.”

A more recent Hay student, Sasha Krasutskaya, came to him from Kiev, Ukraine, via the University of Minnesota at Duluth where she did her undergraduate work with professor Jim Klueg (himself a former student of Hay), who steered her to ISU to do her master’s in fine arts.

“The teaching mastery of Dick Hay came from the fact that he had a case-by-case approach to his students,” Krasutskaya recalls. “He would not impede our creative processes no matter how mad, but he didn’t encourage stupid impulses, either. He constantly pushed us to have a critical approach to our own art — and that meant that he didn’t want us to engage in safe thinking like saying ‘flowers are beautiful’ or ‘puppies are cute.’ He wanted art to communicate to the viewer, to generate an emotional response of some kind. If we had a technical problem in implementing our vision, he helped us figure out how to solve it. He would turn over the entire art building — if necessary — to help us facilitate our work.”

In appreciation for Hay’s inspiring teaching, at the time he retired, many of his former students gathered from around the world to stage a retirement party in his honor and give him tickets for two to Barcelona, Spain, and $3,000 spending money.

But Hay has not slowed down from being a producing ceramic artist. If anything, now that he is not teaching he has more time for his work than ever. He says that he is a night owl who will work until the wee hours. To stimulate his mind, he often steps outside from his studio into the darkness and gazes at the colors of the heavens and the slight glow of light enveloping Terre Haute to the west of his Clay County home.

“The challenge for ceramic artists, or any kind of an artist, is to explain what they are about in ways other people can understand but also in ways people haven’t seen before,” says Hay. “Artists need to embellish reality to get people to pay attention to them. It is essential for artists to really excite people who view our work — to give them a momentary sense that before their eyes is something as extraordinary in its own way as King Kong.

“Reality is boring. It is shopping malls and White Castles. Sometimes when you’re driving around you might see magnificent scenery or a beaver in a dam up in Parke County, but National Geographic is always carrying stories about places like that.

“If we know the plot of a book and how it is going to end, then we’ll put it down. It’s the same in art. It’s the intrigue that gets people engaged with something — the quest to find the big one like the narrator Ishmael related in ‘Moby Dick’ when he told about Captain Ahab’s obsession with the legendary white whale. People love reading about extraordinary characters willing to risk their lives to catch their dreams; in a similar way, art lovers want to find subjects to look at that hook their minds — art that transports them from their ordinary lives.”

Hay says that every four or five years he changes his basic background structure for the artistic themes he is exploring. A few years ago he moved away from vessels to big, deeply textured ceramic bowls, which he uses to contain recognizable and not-so-recognizable shapes and images.

As he explores this newest phase of his art, Hay pours into his textured bowls a frothy soup of chunky ceramic forms — sort of a box of intellectual animal crackers that makes viewers of the bowl’s contents puzzle about the eyeful. Some odd figures resemble geometric shapes; others are blocks with less familiar markings like the soles of shoes. Most shapes in Hay’s quasi-geometric stew have no basis in human symbolic thought. He believes these images are the ones that pique the most thinking.

“I hope that people who study my art might be set free, even if only temporarily, from their long-existing mental boxes,” says Hay.

        

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