Hooked on Clay

John McNulty claims he became a ceramicist because he couldn’t
draw.

“I wanted to be an artist,” he says, but he was discouraged about
his drawing prowess, or lack thereof, when he was an art student at the
State University of New York at Potsdam—so discouraged, in fact,
that he added a second major and planned to get certified as a
social-studies teacher.

Then, one day, he had a chance encounter with clay.

“I happened to go downstairs in the art building and saw someone
throwing a pot,” he remembers. “‘Ah!’ I thought, ‘That looks like a
skill that can be learned.’

“I fell in love with ceramics. I got hooked on clay.”

That was 40 years ago; McNulty has been making ceramic art ever
since. He recently opened a sumptuous show of 38 wall pieces at
Tucson’s Temple Gallery.

Veering between functional and fine art, every piece is a mirror
that works, but each has a frame that’s brilliantly colored and adorned
with strange and fanciful McNulty creations. Roses and grapes, angels
and skulls, turkeys and flamingos dance across his lively 3-D surfaces,
as do the moon, the sun and the stars.

A Bacchus head grins out of the wreath “Grapes of Wrath I,” a
celebration of the grape in circular ceramic. A hapless Ophelia is
about to slip beneath the glassy surface of her mirror in the eponymous
“Ophelia,” while joyous roses tumble over each other with abandon in
the “TT’s Roses” series.

The colors of the glazes that drench these objects are
extraordinary. A swoon-inducing shade called orange juice—a pale
orange tinged with peach—is paired with solar yellow in “TT’s
Roses I.” The charming roses, burning with the hot shades of the sun,
are entwined around a square mirror, curling and overlapping and
pushing their way into the third dimension.

“From the Garden,” a horizontal stretch of lawn wrapped around a
rectangular mirror, has the rich greens and pale pinks and yellows of
summer in New York’s far north, where McNulty grew up. In “DOD” and
“The Katrinas,” skulls and skeletons inspired by the recent season of
the Day of the Dead are deathly mementos mori in charcoal and red.

These glistening pieces are not so much sculptures as “paintings in
clay,” as the artist aptly explains.

Given McNulty’s mastery of his medium, it’s hard to believe that
this is his first solo exhibition. His works have appeared in group
shows of all sorts over the decades, and ceramics-lovers in the know go
to a Christmas sale at his house every year. The real reason for the
neglect is that instead of promoting his own career, McNulty has spent
the last three decades lionizing other artists in town.

For most of the last 30 years, he’s been manager of the Tucson
Museum of Art’s museum shop, an enterprise that under his direction is
a superb crafts gallery, light years away from a gift shop. McNulty
curates, offering premium exhibition space to jewelers, glass artists,
fiber artists, painters in tin, ceramicists and the occasional painter.
During the museum’s troubled years a decade or more ago, McNulty’s
store—and its artists—were the best things going in the
museum.

He also worked as a janitor at the museum, long ago, and once
curated its Arizona Biennial. He even directed the
museum’s school for a time, bustling over his young charges like a
kindly mother hen. (Years ago, when I was a stay-at-home mom, my
daughter went to the school. One frantic day during the blazing summer,
my son fell ill, and director McNulty was kind enough to bring my
daughter out to my car himself after school, so I wouldn’t have to
dislodge my sick toddler from his car seat.)

He knew about kids, he says, because he was the oldest of seven in
his Irish Catholic family, back home in Watertown, north of Syracuse
and south of the St. Lawrence River.

McNulty left the frozen country in 1972, traveling with a group of
artist friends to Tucson. “One woman was doing grad work at the UA,” he
says. Early on, he settled into an old adobe in Dunbar Spring, a
sprawling place that was once a boarding house for railroad workers.
Now elaborately decorated and restored, the house has been featured in
design magazines.

His kiln is at the house, and whenever he has a spare moment from
the museum, he’s out in the studio working clay. He’s been fashioning
the pieces for the Temple show since August.

His first step in the complicated process of making the mirrored
wall pieces is alighting on the right found object to use as a mold.
(He also makes thrown pots on a wheel, but they’re not in this
show.)

The hearts in a series of Valentine pieces at the Temple, all pink
and red and white, were cookie-cutters, he explains, and the abstract
designs in his “Out of India” works came from patterned picture
frames.

He rolls out the clay, and then presses the picture frame or the
cookie-cutter into its yielding surface, eking out patterned crevices
or slicing out a heart. Then he pours latex or plastic into the shaped
clay, to create a mold “negative,” and fires it up into the kiln to
harden it.

Once the mold is ready, he fills it with clay and fires that up,
until, finally, he’s got an array of white ceramic hearts or roses or
ropes or angels. Once they’re dry, he paints each one with three layers
of commercial glaze, allowing time to dry in between coats.

Then the colored pieces go back into the kiln, where they’re
subjected to a heat of 1,400 to 1,800 degrees.

He makes one piece at a time, and though he keeps notes of his molds
and colors, no two works are exactly alike. He builds up the layers
around his thrift-shop mirrors, rose upon rose, heart upon heart,
covering up seams as he goes.

“Gluing it together is the last stage,” he says. “That’s where the
variability comes in. And that’s where the artistry is.”

This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2009.