Robert Glover  

ceramic sculpture

 ceramic artist educator and designer

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Glover studied ceramics with Anthony H, Ivins, and painting with Douglas McClellan at Chaffey College in 1954-6, From 1956-1960 he studied with  Peter Voulkos and Helen Richter Watson  at the Los Angeles County Art Institute, where he received his MFA with a major in Ceramics and Painting in 1960, (now Otis College of Art and Design).).

Glover retired after 39 years of teaching and as Full Professor at the Otis College of Art and Design in 2001, He briefly returned to teach a Color and Design course for  the Spring of 2002.

  . . .The Otis website is at: http://www.otis.edu/

1976-1978  - Fabric Designer/Helica. Los Angeles, CA

Fabric Designer/ Ibis-Sydney Cobb Designs, Los Angeles, CA

1972 - Design Consultant/Interpace (Ceramic Mural Division).

1961-1962 - Designer/Millard Sheets Inc. Claremont, CA

1960 - Art Director/ Clokey Film Studios "Gumby".  Covina, CA
 
 

Nigrosh, Leon "Sculpting Clay", Davis Publisher. 1992

Krantz, Les. "American Artists: Ref. Les Krantz Pub. 1985

Ceramics Monthly: June/ July / August  1984, p. 75. -Feb/Mar 1980 and Jan 1979 issues.

International Sculpture Cover Photo, Aug/Sep 1984

Conrad, John. "Contemporary  Ceramics Techniques", Prentice/Hall Pub.
 

Donahue, Marlena. "Galleries", LA Times Dec. 15, 1989

Laurence,Michael,"Reviews",Sculpture, May/June 1988 p.32

McCloud, Mac. Visions, Summer 1988 pages 6-7.

Clothier,Peter."Remembrances of Things Past", L.A. Weekly, Dec 27-Jan 2, 1986.
 
 

Everson Museum of Fine Arts/Syracuse, NY

Oakland Museum of Art  "California Crafts" Oakland, CA.

Works in over 90  private collections and 15 select corporate collections.         
 

L. A. ArtCore
The Group (Otis Parsons School of Art and Design)
Aids Project LA (APLA)  Project Angel
Shanti Health Clinic
Venice Health Clinic
LACE
The Bella Lewitzky Dance Foundation

Currently, Glover is continuing his ceramic work at Silica Studios in Palm Springs, CA. Noting special gratitude to owners, Tim McMullen, Dona Vanden Heuvel, and Daric Harvie for creating a great environment for mud art.

Three Pods.  Group Sculpture 2009  Earthenware coil, burnished terra sigillata.  Polished with bee's wax. Created at Silica Studios 2009, Palm Springs, California.

Photo courtesy Dona Vanden Heuvel

Currently, Glover is working with earthenware processes.  The forms are made by coil and pinch techniques.  The surfaces are embellished with a variety of painted terra sigillata designs and then burnishing while leather hard.  Most of the forms are closed (no open vessel references). This is an attempt to emphasize their sculptural integrity.

A sixteen page catalog representing the survey is available upon request.  The catalog cover is duotone and the pages contain large detailed color photos (8 pages) and black/white photos (6 pages).  The catalog size is approximately 8 x 11 inches. The cost is $10 for the catalog and includes shipping. Send invoice and check to: Robert Glover, 75 Sutton Place West, Palm Desert, CA 92211-9100  

Catalog thumbnail view

Catalog Introduction

Robert Glover: A Survey of Work

Melding the artistic traditions of ceramics and sculpture. Robert Glover’s works of the last three decades manifest clay’s potential as an autonomous artistic medium. Fusing the processes of craft and fine art, once regarded as mutually exclusive, his pieces play at the nexus between the two exploring clay’s substantive, structural and conceptual relationship to nature and life. While evidencing a profound interest in abstract form that reaches towards prehistory through Brancusi, these works simultaneously extend the legacy of mid-twentieth century craft innovators such as Peter Voulkos with whom Glover once studied.

His early sculptures of the ‘7Os are fin-like slab constructions that visually culminate in a matrix of wild and tangled tubular projections. Simultaneously lyrical and disturbing, these works carry Romantic innuendoes of nature as seemingly pure and ideal, but threatened and haunted by chaos and disorder. Such paradoxes are sublimated in Glover’s early ‘8Os site-specific installations that were configured in desert terrains. Projecting ancient and celebratory cadences, those minimalist pieces forged a path towards the menhir like sculptures that have occupied the artist in recent decades,

Echoing with the memories of Stonehenge. Celtic menhirs, and of their implicit significance as markers of human existence. Glover’s early monolithic

sculptures were inspired by desert dust devils. Fabricated of unglazed earthenware, they assert a stately but reserved presence, disclosing extraordinarily intricate pumice-like surfaces that recall weatherworn coral or stone. Like so many of Glover’s works these lyrical works are infused with metaphors of nature and growth. At the same time, their stone-like hue and immobility murmur with the promises of permanence, yet bear the traces of former transient and molten existence. While made of material substance, these pieces project a ghostly, spiritual immateriality.

By contrast the sculptures of the ‘90s, establishing an unequivocal presence, endowing form with poetic color. The leitmotif of growth is reconsidered, often brought to an equivocal climax that features primary forms such as an ovoid egg or kidney bean finial. Inverting tales of progress and evolution, these sculptures emphasize the cycles of life’s repetitions, intoning the indeterminacy of existence. In Classic Gas, a crowning Greek Ionic capital form sinks into the stratums of time presented as a sculpted wedge, while technological gears meet a similar fate in Yadada. Paradox thus emerges as a central theme in these sculptures that find an intriguing counter fugue in Glover’s nonfunctional vessels.

Numerous ceramic vessels embrace and enclose an interior space that remains unseen. Projecting a sense of fullness and well-being, these spherical orbs bespeak a world of equilibrium. Such equanimity is antithetical to the sculptures where space is often caught and trapped between component parts, while form plays upon the razor edges of balance. Thus, in rarified moments, Glover’s works find profound equilibrium while in others the improbability of such ambitions remains predominant. With honesty and conviction, his works move from the physical to the metaphysical realm considering the impossible promise of weighing and balancing time, space, and narrative.

 

Collette Chattopadhyay

 

Notes on ceramic sculpture: "I am drawn to the puissant elegance of totems, using radically varied clay forms assembled to create a visual syntax, bringing to mind stacked stone desert monoliths, at once precarious and potent. The resultant pilaster has the uneasy feeling of imbalance we experience while standing on one leg. Monopeds. By using the juxtaposition of abstract and representation, sensual and symbolic - my intention is to articulate the vanities of balance in both physical and spiritual realms.

The sculptures are created by using a variety of techniques, such as slab, coil and press-molds. The glazing and firings are multiple and layered. The sculptures are the result of stacked forms supported on a steel armature and secured to a base". Robert Glover

A survey covering 22 years of Glover's work was presented by LA Artcore Center at Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso Street <Little Tokyo> in Los Angeles.     Website: http://www.laartcore.org   Phone 213.617.3274                FAX 213 616.0303 

Examples of work shown at LA Artcore

Click on any image to enlarge

Photo survey: Collection of sculptures and vessels. Media: Ceramics. Technique: Coil and slab. Carved and applied texture. Multiple low fired glazes and unglazed surfaces.  No.1, 3 & 5, 1995.  No.2, 1997.  No.7 / 1989. No. 4 & 6, 1994.    The above examples (No.6, 7, 8, 9 and 10) are in private collections. No.8 / 1985 in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of Art. Photo 3: Ceramic Sculpture-"Yadada" 1997. H37"xW17"xD4" multi-layered low temperature glazes, metallic lusters, on earthenware textured, coil and slab construction. Exhibited at the Kitakyushu Municipal Art Gallery, Kitakyushu, Japan Nov. 1997.Curator, Yoshio Ikezaki