Back in October, a retrospective exhibition of my ceramic works called Out of the Floodwaters was featured in the Shore Gallery on the campus of Abilene Christian University. Some may be surprised to discover that I have been involved with clay over most of my lifetime.

I took a ceramics course for the first time in 1977 and fell in love with the medium. By the time I graduated I had an equal number of ceramic and painting courses and struggled to decide which of these disciplines I wanted to study in graduate school. I chose painting, thinking that would be the end of ceramics! Some years later when I was hired as a professor by ACU, I returned to making a few works in clay as a sideline–the university had all the necessary equipment and I needed no assistance to produce, glaze, and fire the works on my own. Then in 1992, our department lost its ceramics teacher during a reduction in faculty and I was asked to take over full responsibility for the ceramics curriculum alongside my duties teaching painting. I taught all of our ceramics courses between then and 2005. My good friend Kenny Jones was hired that year as a new faculty member, and since he had his own expertise in the area, he and I began to alternate semesters of teaching ceramics. Almost a decade later we began to hire adjuncts to teach these courses; still, I continued to teach a summer course in ceramics at least every other year. With the exception of a few scattered years, I made ceramic work pretty consistently through the years, always when I was teaching, though less so when not.

My ceramic work has never been featured on this website because the focus of the site was intended to be painting and a bit of drawing. That changes today–or at least for this blog post!

How this exhibition came about is a wonderful story, though that story is steeped in loss. This picture is a hint; so too the title of the exhibition, Out of the Floodwaters.

You can read the story in the Exhibition Statement

and see a selection of the works included in the exhibition in Floodwaters Survey