Larry Paul Wright
Artist in Clay

Larry Paul Wright is a musician and ceramic artist. His studio in Venice, CA, is shared with his cat, Blue, who occasionally helps form and decorate clay works. Larry Paul says of the pottery and sculpture they produce: "There has become a healthy check and balance between
the severe and lean influence of my mentor, the British ceramic artist, Nicholas Vergette, and what seems to be my natural tendency toward flamboyance." In any case, relates Larry Paul, "The ease with which
these sensibilities are realized is largely a result of a high degree of skill attained from being a production potter. I love the story about the guy who asks the taxi driver in New York, 'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?' and the driver says, 'Practice, practice, practice."

Larry Paul studied with David Shaner at the University of Illinois, was apprenticed to Robert Eckles in his production pottery on the shores of Lake Superior, and with Nicholas Vergette, at Southern Illinois University, where he was awarded a BA in ceramics. Then came the practice: from sitting at the potters wheel for ten years in the pottery shop he and his partner, Macy Dorf, operated in Denver. "The skill derived from all those years of intense dialog with clay, enables me to push it a lot further than most artists and make it look easy," Larry Paul says.

The next twenty five years were spent with pottery and sculpture sharing the limelight with music and concurrent career as a professional firefighter in the Denver area. He retired from firefighting in 1998 and so his art is once again his only occupation. Instead of putting fires out, he is building them. Fires to caress his art and reveal the lustrous beauty of glazes.

Wheel-thrown pottery has recently taken a back seat to ceramic sculptures, both free-standing and wall-hung, which have captured not only Larry Paul's fancy, but that of a growing number of patrons in the
Los Angeles area. His palate of glazes and the unique shapes only he is able to produce set his work apart from anything else being shown today.

Larry Paul's work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the midwest and the Rocky Mountain region and is represented in countless private collections. Although a relative newcomer to Southern California, he is rapidly gaining the renown and following there that he has enjoyed in previous venues.

Kiln

To th right, are pictures of my kiln, which demonstrate how much my clay shrinks (about an inch in ten) when it's fired. When this five-foot pot was
loaded into the kiln unfired, it brushed the top of the arch. Then after the bisque, or first relatively low temperature firing, it had shrunk to the size you see in the first photo. Then it was taken out, and glazes were applied and it was fired again to a higher temperature (2300 degrees F).

The second photo shows how much smaller it became after the glaze firing. This shrinkage isn't so noticeable with a four inch pot, but as you can see, a four foot pot is an entirely different matter.

Pottery Wheel

The bottom right picture, is me, standing on a stool to finish the rim of this vase on my potters wheel, ca. 1972.