F.A.G ART! Kellogg Johnson's Fabulous Ceramics!!

Kellogg Johnson
Isla Vista
Ceramic and bronze
47 x 41 x 14

Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe



Kellogg Johnson has long been drawn to the vessel form as the essence of ceramic art. Instinctively aware of the depth of meaning within our ancient human engagement with ceramics, he has evolved an archaeological metaphor in his work. He builds large-scale vessels and takes them through a physically arduous and hazardous process of firing and finishing with the result that his pieces already appear to be artifacts of great antiquity. Stained and scarred, burned and blemished and sometimes even broken and repaired, they seem as if they had lain in the earth for millennia, relics of some long-forgotten civilization. In their ambitious scale, Johnson's vessels are actually larger than most ancient pottery—except, perhaps, the great clay jars called "pithoi" found in the labyrinthine storage magazines of the Palace of Minos.