Gastkünstler im Internationalen Künstlerhaus

Dennis O'Leary returned to ceramic sculpture after 40 years of working in arts administration. The work seen on this site is the result of a recent one year engagement in his studio and at Monterey Peninsula College which offers numerous class opportunities and high-quality facilities in which to work. Much credit for this resurgence goes to Diane Eisenbach, ceramic artist and MPC ceramic program head, and the supporting technical staff, for their open and encouraging attitude to all who attend this remarkable and enabling program.

​These ceramic sculptures began as an investigation into making Stones. At first small stones were created from manipulating hand-build clay spheres, torquing and squeezing them until they "popped", creating an air hole and leaving the imprint of that process as a record of their creation. Various finishes were explored, including simply leaving the clay to "finish" itself in the high-fire kilns, which proved to be a satisfactory rendition for the stone-like qualities he was attempting. These, and all the works evolving from them, have no specific reference to top or bottom and are meant to be personally experienced by hand, and placed however one finds engaging. 

The Stones soon assumed a life of their own and began taking on human characteristics. Multiple punctures suggested eyes and mouths and oblong shapes represented distorted heads. Furthering these notions a group of "Head Stones" emerged which remained fairly abstract for a while, but later took on the realm of historical figures who had been beheaded and depicted in historical renderings including John the Baptist, Medusa, and his favorite Saint Denis.

The Stones became more abstract as they developed, and rough, finger-marked textures suggested meteorite characteristics that he soon became enamored with. Over the next six months he explored a diversity of forms loosely based on meteor imagery, and significantly, on images of Chinese Gongshi, better known as Scholar Stones, revered for centuries throughout the Asian world. Informed by these two naturally-formed phenomena, the work became decidedly abstract and organic, with very rough textures and simple finishes utilizing both high-fire and raku techniques.

Throughout this time. O'Leary played with making renderings of sea shells. Initially they were over-sized replicas of mussel and clam shells he found on the beaches with some semblance of realism. In an attempt to further abstract them, he began to exaggerate their conical shapes and accentuate the brilliant colors by firing them using the age-old Japanese Raku method. The technique also became a method of choice for the eccentric meteorites.

Dennis O'Leary found his initial artistic success in ceramics as an art student at the University of California in Santa Barbara where he received a MFA degree in 1970. Subsequently, with the lack of a ceramic studio, he found satisfaction with an array of other creative endeavors and artistic enterprises over the next forty years. In addition to making sculpture sporadically through the 1970s and 80s, he served as the Assistant Director of Education at the San Francisco Museum of Art from 1972 through 1979, and then Assistant Professor of Art at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana from 1979 to 1981 where he managed the school's gallery program and taught fundamentals of art courses in both studio and academic subjects. 

Fed up with the bureaucy of university inaction, O'Leary moved to Boise, Idaho in 1981 to assume the position of Executive Director with the small-scale Boise Gallery of Art. After sixteen years he left the institution transformed with two major building expansions, a staff of twenty, and a budget of $1,000,000 into the Boise Art Museum. Knowing when enough is enough, O'Leary was fortunate to be able to return to California in 1997 to become Executive Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside just south of San Francisco in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Here he helped provide "the gift of time" to over 1,000 artists (with a thousand before them), being able to achieve that goal on his own in 2011 by retiring and moving to Pacific Grove to rekindle his ambition to make art full time – or at least whenever he felt the urge. So far so good....