Top:
Ron Nagle in his San
Francisco studio work-
ing on a Weeorama.
Middle and bottom:
Nagle’s airbrush jars and
underglaze test tiles.
Opposite:
Knights o f Franconia
,
2008, ceramic,
4Vbx5V4x2Viin.
another. In this case, however, I use this term to describe the self-
imposed limitations that characterize Nagle’s practice. Like Moran-
di, or Robert Ryman (who has used only white paint for decades),
Nagle pared things down to a narrow set of parameters early on
in his career—within which he has found extraordinary richness.
Another, less inflammatory, description of Nagle might be an
artist who “thinks through craft,” a phrase that originates with the
curator and craft historian Glenn Adamson. The process through
which Nagle’s extraordinary objects are made is crucial to the
achievement of his ideas, but at the same time incidental to our ex-
perience of the things themselves. Craft is not the end, but the
means—though saying this is in no way meant to belittle or ignore
that craft. A thick drip of glaze might hang from the edge of one
of his forms, but the perfect shape of that drip is the result of pains-
taking adjustments. In some pieces, he leaves nothing to chance,
carving a faux drip out of clay before the glaze is ever applied. As
Nagle puts it, “It isn’t how you get there—it’s whether or not it
works.” But it is also important to him that he gets there through
clay: “the only material that can achieve the feel and look and purity
that I have always been oriented toward.”
As Nagle told me, “I’m really much more interested in painting
than I am in sculpture. My work is about surface, proportion of
color. I learned that from [Josef] Albers, Barnett Newman—and
a lot of Japanese stuff. Like a deep green kimono with just a tiny
piping of persimmon. Proportion is key. I love oddball color combi-
nations.” Since his 20s, Nagle has been involved in a parallel career
as a musician and songwriter. When asked if the importance of bal-
ance and proportion in his sculpture is reflected in the way he goes
about this other pursuit, he replied, “Absolutely. I work in a tradi-
tional songwriting format. You’ve got an intro, a verse, chorus,
another verse, maybe a lick, bridge, chorus, out. Something like that.
You know what to expect. This kind of predetermined format was
part of what was so attractive to me about the cup. You’ve got a han-
dle but it’s also asymmetrical.
... It has a foot, an opening—how can
you mess around with these, in how many ways? How can you mess
around with the proportions, the color? How can you use that
shape to do a painting on top of it? As with overdubbing in recording,
you can add layer after layer—but in painting, you are building up
surface and color. And there’s also humor, which is very much part
of music, and the people I hang around with—we have a great time
and are also totally moved by sadness, sad stuff. Like Johnny Cash,
before he died, doing “Wichita Lineman.” Or Tom Waits doing
“Somewhere” from
West Side Story.
Beautiful. I love combinations
of emotions, the tension created by this kind of odd miscasting.”
Nagle’s distinctive mix of humor and melancholy emerges in
his pieces’ titles. “It’s not what the piece is about, he asserted.
“It’s more like naming your kid. It’s by feel.
... This just looked like >
044 american craft dec/jan 10
Find more magazines at www.magazinesdownload.com
Photos Elena Dorfman.
