Richard Shaw - the animated still life

I received a package in the mail a couple of days ago from a ceramic artist friend named Richard Shaw. Richard's a very successful artist who lives and works in Fairfax, California. I met him many years ago through my friend and former Ceramics instructor, Josh Nadel. He's been a generous and supportive friend since then. He sent me an invitation to an exhibit and a new book that features his work and an interesting interview. He's been making amazingly detailed sculptures in clay of assemblages of various common found objects. His works are skillfully created from clay and are considered trompe l'oeil masterpieces. They often take the form of animated figures made of various seemingly random parts. He also painstakenly creates ceramic still lifes. They are sentimental in nature as the objects appear to be from another time.

Here are excerpts from the interview:
"I think taking the still life and making it into a person is like breathing life into it. But there's nothing wrong with the still life because it still has the presence of somebody who arranged that stuff. "

"The phrase 'nature mort' - dead nature, is that it? That's how they refer to the still life. Well, I'm trying to do the opposite, make it alive, not dead."

check out more of Richard's work at: http://www.bquayartgallery.com/archive/shaw2007.html