Forty-five years after he graduated with an MFA from UC Davis among funk art proponents, artist Richard Shaw can’t help but move with the twists and turns, the push and pull, of the contradictions inherent in his artwork – witty, wonderful trompe l’oeil ceramics that fool the eye and coax chuckles of disbelief from the viewer.
This time around, for his exhibition of new works at Gallery Paule Anglim, Shaw focuses on uncanny all-porcelain still lifes of palettes, paint tubes and broken guitar pegs that might be unearthed at an artist’s studio. Consider them both a fond love letter to and a sly poke at a realm that Shaw is all too familiar with. “I do poke fun at the art world for being too self-important, for sure,” Shaw, 71, says from Fairfax. “My dad was a cartoonist and worked at Disney, and growing up, that was always around me. I wanted to be a real artist when I saw Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings at 18 – I wanted to be that guy and move people with my work. But still this stupid humor keeps creeping in! It’s in me. I can’t help it.”
Q: Are you always fighting the law of gravity?
A: Oh, yes, gravity is always a problem. (The works of art are) real fragile and make me nervous. Sometimes you gotta whack one to break it, but making it, when you defy gravity and the clay is wet or you try to get it to stand up without falling over … I wish I were a painter. Maybe the stuff is about me wishing I was doing something else because they’re just physically hard to make.
Q: Is there anything that the new works share?
A: The only thing is the idea of the possibility of art supplies – you go to an art store and think, oh, boy, if I only had that, I could make something great. It’s kind of a romance with art materials.
Q: How did you come to develop your trompe l’oeil approach?
A: Porcelain has that quality of looking like something else – it can look like things in nature – and I kept going toward wood looking like wood and discovered a whole tradition of this in art-making or craft, people making things out of clay that looked like something else, but functional like jars or inkwells. I’ve always been in love with the humor and skill of American trompe l’oeil artists like (John) Peto, (William) Harnett and (John) Haberle, all the people from the turn of the century, glorifying dumb things like a horseshoe on the wall. When someone presents it to you as a form of art, it makes you wake up and look at it.
If you go
Richard Shaw: New Work: Through Aug. 24. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Gallery Paule Anglim, 14 Geary St., S.F. (415) 433-2710. www.gallerypauleanglim.com.
Kimberly Chun is a Berkeley writer. E-mail: 96hours@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kimberlychun
Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Richard-Shaw-New-Work-Humor-streak-at-play-4685223.php