In the evolving world of ceramic sculpture, San Francisco-based artist/teacher Jeff Downing is well established as a formidable artistic force, creating a steady stream of innovative and adventurous work that pushes boundaries and breaks new ground even as it vividly reflects the artist’s own path and the very personal touchstones that have marked his circuitous creative journey.
New York born and raised, Downing spent his early years on the waters of Long Island Sound, the place where he began to create his own world. His prodigious ceramic output overflows with nautical references – playfully, cryptically floating like emotional flotsam and jetsam through his works. He remembers carefree days on the water with his best buddy, his boat and Sienna, the Chesapeake Bay retriever that was constantly at his side. Dogs have emerged as an important, recurring subjects in Downing’s work. And that sense of nostalgia and innocence still lights up his ceramic pieces, which radiate a visceral, moment-of-creation spontaneity and energy.
Downing’s initial creative impulses were musical. He moved to San Francisco in 1983 with proverbial suitcase and guitar in hand, but a chance encounter with an art school ceramics class soon altered his trajectory. Captivated by the pioneering work of California ceramic artists including Peter Voulkus and Robert Arneson, Downing dove headlong into ceramic sculpture, but music remains an important part of his artistic palette and always accompanies his creative process.
Now in his 25th year at San Francisco State University, as a tenured full professor Downing heads up the school’s ceramics area, constantly challenging students to push boundaries and expand the form. It’s a job that allows him the freedom and creative space to push his own art into new places.
GENERAL ARTIST STATEMENT
My creative process draws from a combination of life experience and intuitive thinking. Through my work, I explore a mythos that is symbolic of my affinity for nature and a deep fascination for maritime culture. I have a passion for the sea that first came from my father who was an avid sailor. From the age of ten, I learned the rules of the sea aboard a forty-foot sailboat voyaging from Nova Scotia to Bermuda to the Chesapeake Bay, up and down much of the Atlantic Coast.
Before GPS navigation was permitted for civilian use in the 1980s, my father knew how to navigate the waterways aided by a variety of uniquely shaped and sounding navigational markers. He taught me how to plot courses using traditional marine instruments like charts, the compass and the sextant to steer by the stars. I also learned the value of simple eyeball navigation – our ability to just eyeball our way around a body of water. Reduced to its purest form, human navigation is simply a matter of being able to look at something from a distance and say what it is. In a state of nature we can travel knowingly only as far as we can see. Using eyeball navigation, everything we see around us is more than just scenery – the buoys, the landmarks, the textures and contours of the shore are critical because we are trying to extract any information from them to determine our exact location.
But, being miles off shore, out-of-sight of land and markers, the risk of getting lost at sea was a terrifying thought to me. I was always relieved to hear a buoy’s bell through the fog or to see the light flashing from a distant lighthouse. Reading marine charts and locating navigational buoys to steer clear of hazardous conditions gave me comfort. Harboring along the rugged New England coast exposed me to many different small-town maritime communities.
Remote fishing villages on the coast of Maine made the biggest impact on me. I was fascinated with the life of the lobsterman. From what I observed, they were makers of things. Besides catching and selling lobsters, a day in the life for them was boat building, weaving nets, making lobster traps and fishing weirs, constructing docks and shacks, painting lobster buoys and repairing outboard motors. All of these tasks and handicrafts I eagerly taught myself to do. As a teenager, I spent my days tinkering in my father’s workshop – inventing stuff. This practice eventually evolved into my lifelong devotion to art making.
The surfaces of my sculpture are often embedded with coded messages and varied icons of maritime traditions. Vessels are representative of passage and transformation. Monumental figures symbolize guardians keeping a watch out for the hazards ahead. They act as spirit guides leading us to places of safe harbor and recovery. The portrayals in these works often operate as a device for finding solace in an uncertain world, imbued with a sense of mystery that enables the imagery to be interpreted in multiple ways.
Some of my sculpture alludes to the ancient practice of depicting dogs for their formal and spiritual qualities. As in many mythologies, dogs, brave and sympathetic are seen as guides and protectors from the perils of danger, negative sprits, and inevitable mortality. As I investigate these mythologies in my work, the strange and beautiful canine has become an allegory of how I attempt to make sense of human culture and our vast disconnect with the natural and mystical world.
