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Gail McCarthy

Impressionist in Clay

As Seen in Buffalo Spree Nov/Dec 2000

By Linda Levine

When an artist achieves effects in clay that cause surfaces to dance—on bowls, walls, chalices—to the extent of evoking comparisons to Monet, it is a considerable achievement.

But Gail McCarthy has never attempted to emulate any other artist. Rather, she's in the process of becoming more and more herself. She started out expressing herself in matte white porcelain, calling to mind twentieth century modernist sculptors. Leaving Puritanical white behind, she now immerses her work in undulating, sensuous color.

McCarthy creates lusterware. So individual a medium, she says, that "there are about twenty people in the world who work with lusters." Yet, her presence in a rare category does not push her out of the mainstream. Rather, she's entered a class of ceramists who have been pushing the boundaries of the genre. Now that she's attained such mastery of technique that she controls her effects at will, she is pointedly interested in the idea of artistic control: where it begins, where it ends.

For the twenty-five years that I have been aware of her work—in the beginning, at craft fairs—her pieces have been increasingly valued, and have grown in power. A conscious development—"I had to get people to stop thinking of me as doing coffee table objects"—she began doing walls, works of true stature. Ever since that change, she's worked both small and large.

As masterful as her architectural work is, her sculptural work has a different, but equally impressive impact. The fascinating, near-primordial forms are reminiscent or archaeological finds discovered after a rest of centuries under the earth or under the sea. These precious goblets and vases, short or tall, are nearly like everyday household effects (of wealthy householders) but have crystalline surfaces unimaginably obtained.

An interest in shape is as constant a strand with her as her focus on light. "Lusters are all about light," she says, but it is also through shape—outward contours—that her work achieves its form. The constant challenge is to mesh the elements of shape, light, and color, as in music.

To sense how she became able to incorporate color in her ceramics, it helps to learn something about her life. Her personal story meshes inextricably with her art. She abandoned white for color "when the joy came back into my life." It is true that years of experience as the wife of a congressman in Washington D.C. had its good moments. She was "in and out of the White House dozens of times," became a lifelong friend of Lindy (Mrs. Hale) Boggs, and embarked on her calling as a ceramist. But, on balance, it was a difficult time. She divorced, and returned to Buffalo needing to start over.

Starting over turned out to be a blessing. It was the mid-1970s. "Buffalo presented amazing educational opportunities, particularly at the School of Architecture and Planning," McCarthy remembers. "It was a crazy and exciting time." Becoming a student of design at the School, she was fascinated by the challenges design could address, even as far as solving her own problems of raising five children. "The vocabulary of architecture and architectural space provided a way for me to talk about this."

As a ceramist, she traveled from white to lusterware through a period of doing brilliantly vivid, sharp-edged patterns on exterior surfaces of bowls, evocative of Bridget Riley paintings, with linings of either gold leaf or silver leaf. The colors were pastels but with depth. Always, with color, she has sought depth.

"You can hide behind color," she asserts. She has resisted that evasion. "The emphasis on glazes forced me to flex my muscles around form."

For the last twelve years she has devoted herself to lusterware, developing high glazes in muted colors for sculpturesque objects and for wall-works. Whether these shimmering studies are smooth or textured, seemingly liquid or solid, they dependably are centered in light. As I see it, the continuing theme of her career has been light, and she doesn't demur.

"Fire, earth, air, water," she mused as we talked in her studio. "I am fascinated by alchemy." How could it be otherwise? As expressive as ceramics can be, especially with the exuberance she employs, there is a science to it—a physics, a chemistry. In a ceramic mural—composed of many tiles—for a large wall, she seeks a reliable evenness amidst the glazes. In a sculptural torso, human in abstracted form, she strives for a luster so high that she repeatedly adds glazes for reduction in firing. But unlike the painter in oils, she must limit herself to four or five firings or risk breaking a piece in the kiln.

From the sublime to the mundane, McCarthy notes on index cards the "recipes" for her glazes, which "have many things including colorants." She has long since acquired a serious scientific method, thanks to the necessities of her art. The inventor of all her own glazes, which constitute part of her growing technique, she generically defines a glaze as "melted glass."

"But my work is about more than mastering techniques or developing my own techniques," she says. Indeed, it is partly about capturing a breadth of effect as well as a depth, through the transformative power of the eye to see in larger scale, and to communicate what it sees. And, as compelling an interest as architectural space became for her, so too did an interest in how ceramics could combine with space. Like alchemy.

There are sophisticated forms of transformation, and less sophisticated forms. We passed a photograph on the wall of a recent piece eight feet tall and nearly as wide: monumental. "Big, yes. I'm a maker," McCarthy says. "I can remember as a little kid trying to build a house. Something big."

Where the ceramics came from is also a story about childhood. She was born and raised in South Buffalo where the church she attended had a craft area, letting her get involved with clay. She'd also dig clay in the riverbanks near her home. "Matter which has no form, except what you give it, transformable and malleable," she explains. "It helped that I had great parents who put up with me. I've never been what you'd call a wildly practical person." She'd always start in the middle, rather than at the beginning.

McCarthy speaks of the beautiful house she grew up in and the fine antiques surrounding her. "How we afforded that house I'll never know. We never had any money." Her father, a fire captain she characterized as an aesthete, scouted things out under dust, brought them home, refinished them. He'd barter some pieces for food in the market. So it's no surprise to learn that McCarthy, just as her mother made the curtains and draperies for their house, learned early to make all her own clothes.

On a music scholarship, she went to a Catholic women's college where she took her first ceramics course. "Cello was my instrument. I was quite good. I would sneak m art and ceramics courses when I could." Once back in Buffalo, she taught ceramics and sculpture. She is now Associate Professor of Art Emeritus at Niagara County Community College.

A quick study, a woman with the high intelligence of one able to work amidst remarkable complexity, she says, "I have an industry here." In her studio on the third floor of her house, she has her references for glazes, orders for commissioned works, tools. "I love tools. Here's my bit collection. I'm the fixer in this house." She didn't make but did design her kiln, which has its own room. This huge kiln is large enough to hold eight layers of tiles for composing enormous walls. An older and smaller kiln has been donated to the Jewish Center.

These days, her proudest work is a large wall piece installed permanently for. an architect-designed space at the Cornell University School of Labor Relations in Ithaca. "It is a different piece all day long. The way the sun moves through it imbues life. For me, reflecting and expressing the light of the world is something I've always done. Some art is alive, some is dead. If a piece of mine looks flat, it is not finished. This piece has that magical quality I lust for."

And others have responded— collectors of her pieces, private and corporate, including purchasers in Istanbul, Japan, and the International Ceramic Museum in Facnza, Italy. As a continuous prizewinner and exhibitor in many national and international settings, she's steadily shown in fine Buffalo exhibitions.

Describing her craft as sometimes necessitating drone work, she occasionally has taken on an apprentice. But she prefers the studio in solitude. There is also the pleasure of her life with her supportive, admiring husband Marvin Lunenfeld, retired Distinguished Teaching Professor of history at SUNY. He and she do extensive world traveling, such as to Bali "where everybody is an artist," she says, "and excess in colors and patterns is taken to glorious extremes." She knows that travel permeates her work, "but I never know how."

In any event, the smile doesn't leave her face. Traveling a long distance, she lives in an open-ended world. And her materials fit her world-view. "The luster process is full of magic and alchemy. I guess I've been rooting about for magic all my life."