My mom, Floryns, taught art, dance, and ceramics. My dad, Harold, was a musician and bandleader. Then there was my brother, Alan, a composer, musician and bandleader. With all those artistic genes floating around, naturally I would love all forms of art. As a child, I loved, photography, drawing, painting and music. Art is my existence, my life.

Self taught I find that most days I get up and feel that I just need to do some form of art.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a masque of clay, an acrylic work on paper, grabbing my camera and going out and shooting something or getting on my computer and doing some digital work on one of my existing photos. For me it’s all about the process and the work.

In the mid 1960’s I did a series of paintings similar to my current ‘Patterns’ series and left them with my mother who loved the work and had a beautiful home in Santa Barbara. That home and everything in it burned to the ground in the Monticeto fire and all of that body of art work was lost forever. I decided late in 2011 it was time to revisit that body of work and created ‘Patterns’, a 38 piece collection of works that were inspired by the works of Miro, Caulder and Kandinsky.

In the 1970’s I developed art and craft products for Mattel, Ceramichrome and the art and craft division of General Mills. During my employment at Ceramichrome I got a real education in ceramics, developing a line of once fired ceramic craft products for the mass market called ‘BisqueKits’. For a year I had the honor of working with some of the finest and most highly regarded ceramists in the world. It was an education you couldn’t pay for.

In the late ‘80’s I was re-introduced to ceramics as a friend was taking a ceramics class at a local recreation center and the teacher invited me to stay and create some pieces. That morning I created my first two masques and knew that “masques of clay” were my immediate calling. For the next several years I devoted myself to the creation of ‘masques of clay’. A year later some office space became available with a natural studio in the back. I became totally immersed in masque making and that studio is where I created most of my body of work. In January, 2009, due to the recession, I moved to a much smaller space in Marina del Rey, but so far, I’m delighted with the work I’ve created there as well.

In 2009 I decided to return to another one of my loves, photography and have been working on several series of photographs that depict many of the things that we see and take for granted everyday. One of the series is entitled ‘Textures’ and the pieces are shot in such a way as to let the viewer decide what it is that draws them into the experience. My latest works in photography include a collection of digital photos that stretch me once again to challenge just how far I can go. For me it’s all about pushing my personal envelope to see where the limits of my creativity lie.

Copyright 2012 George Marlowe

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