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Arts & Entertainment Coyote Chronicle
March 22, 2023
THE CLOWN IN ME LOVES YOU 1
By ALYSE DEATHERAGE Managing Editor The Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art here at California State University, San Bernardino, is currently displaying “The Clown in Me Loves You,” an exhibition created by Katherine Gray and Nancy Callan that displays the excellent skills of blown glass work with other mixed media elements. Gray is the current department chair for the Department of Art and Design and a professor here at CSUSB. She is an expert glass blower with an emphasis on Venetian techniques of glass blowing. Likewise, Callan is also an expert glass blower. She studied under the maestro Lino Tagliapietra. According to Callan, Tagliapietra is considered one of the greatest glass blowers in the world. She worked with him for 19 years traveling around the world and helping him produce his intricate and technically challenging artworks. The two met in Seattle and often worked together. They discovered that they had good chemistry when working together on projects and jobs and often asked one another for feedback or assistance with their own projects. After years of joking that they should collaborate one day, they finally began to seriously create a body of work together in 2015, and their exhibition “The Clown in Me Loves You” is the result. This eight-year-long collaboration originally stemmed from the inspiration of Venetian glass-blown clowns. “There also has been this history of glass clowns; sculpted, colorful glass clowns. I think the first ones were probably made sometime in the 1800s,” said Gray. The two found an affinity for clowns as a concept to revisit memories from their childhood and to examine the relationship between clowns and politics throughout history. “You know, we were sharing a love for certain techniques and she brought to mind the Venetian clowns that used to be just beautifully made and so we started talking about them,” said Callan. “Kathy was like ‘I want to do something with these clowns’ and I replied, ‘That is so weird, I want to do it too.’”
One of the first works in the series was based on a paint-by-number painting that Callan holds dear due to childhood memories regarding paint-by-numbers. “Nancy I’m sure will tell you that she had paint-by-number clowns in their living room when she was growing up. They were done by her grandfather,” said Gray. Callan additionally shared that her grandfather, who was a stone carver, was one of her first influences for art. Though she wasn’t aware that the paintings she had seen were paint-bynumbers, she was inspired by his “attention to detail” on even his simplest projects. Gray claimed that that was part of the beauty of paint-by-numbers, that anyone at any level of skill can often do them. They mimic the Venetian clowns according to Gray because the clowns were once made with very intricate glass-blowing techniques, but have devolved into a “more touristy, souvenir kind of thing, not so well made.” Yet, that was also something she admired in them.
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