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Bassam Majeed, 12, looks at a large-scale ceramic cylinder titled "Around a Gas Station" by artist Patrick Siler at 11th and G streets. Public Art Lincoln and the Lincoln Parks and Recreation Department dedicated two of Siler's ceramic cylinders on April 30, with the other work titled "The Blue Roofed House." The public art pieces are on loan for five years to the city of Lincoln from the artist and his wife, Elizabeth. Ceramic Mould For Rubber Hand Gloves
"Around a Gas Station" by Patrick Siler at the Mission Clay Products factory in Arizona.
"The Blue Roofed House" by Patrick Siler at Mission Clay Products, an industrial pipe maker in Arizona.
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“Around a Gas Station” and “The Blue Roofed House” stand on the sidewalk at the southwest corner of 11th and G streets, the brightly colored ceramic pipes towering over passersby.
Created by artist Patrick Siler, the massive 7-foot-tall pipes are the latest addition to the city’s acclaimed outdoor art collection, acquired through the efforts of Public Art Lincoln.
Unlike most large-scale public art, primarily sculpture, Siler’s pipes demand up-close viewing, making their placement on the sidewalk the perfect position.
That’s because the pipes are covered with what are in essence narrative paintings on the ceramic that wrap around the circular structure.
“These pipes are kind of like marrying ceramics and painting,” Siler said. “I tried at other times to do paintings, multicolor images on a pot, on a plate. When I discovered this commercial underglaze at the factory, it enabled me to do a large-scale painting on a big piece of clay, trying to marry the very disparate media.”
That marriage of the two art forms is rooted in Siler’s early ‘60s graduate studies at the University of California-Berkeley, where he was studying painting but also took courses from Peter Voulkos, who encouraged him to paint his clay pieces.
At Berkeley and at Washington State, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, Siler studied abstract expressionist painting. But, after receiving his Master of Arts in 1963, he, like many of his classmates, drifted away from pure abstraction and began incorporating figurative elements in his work.
“Just out of your day-to-day life, you encounter all kinds of visual images and maybe audio images from a song you hear. You transpose that into visual images and pretty soon, you’re doing a drawing or a painting,” Siler said. “That’s kind of the source of images you see on these pipes.”
The scenes on the pipes depict everyday life in Pullman, Washington, where Siler has lived for 50 years.
But, he said, he’s never tried to develop a single theme, or what he called a “gimmick” in his artwork. He figured that out when he took some of his early post-graduate paintings to Chicago, where a gallerist told him that, while he liked the work, it lacked a central theme that would make it commercial.
“I just didn’t want to do that,” Siler said. “I’m not devising a product to put on the market. It’s intellectual and expression exploration. You know, it could easily go from one thing to the next based on various stimuli I’m getting from my own environment. So that’s why I didn’t have a gimmick and just paint one thing. I wasn’t manufacturing a product for the market.”
Siler, who taught ceramics and foundation drawing at Washington State from 1973 to 2005, has, in his 60-year career, created far more than pipes.
Some of his large ceramic walls, paintings and drawings are in the permanent collections of the Jun Kaneko Center for Creativity and The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, both in Omaha, and at the Seattle Art Museum, the American Craft Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., and at the American Museum of Ceramic Art.
The aforementioned factory where he creates the pipes is Mission Clay Products, an industrial pipe maker where Siler goes to work, usually in winter, from his Pullman, Washington home.
But the work on the pipes begins in Pullman, long before he makes the trip to the Arizona factory.
“When I’m doing one of these pipes, I get myself really prepared because I have a limited time down there, say a month,” he said. “It takes a few days to go down there and generate this painting in the round on a big pipe.
“I draw out the pipe painting beforehand. I draw it out, and if there’s a thing for a particular figure that I want to develop, I get all the kinks worked out. I do studies of that, and then I do a composition drawing of the whole thing.
“So when I get down there, I know what I’m gonna do. If I want to make a change at that time, no problem, because I’ve got a fundamental structure where I’m gonna be putting something down, adding something or taking something away.”
Siler “paints” on the pipes by reproducing the preparatory drawings using charcoal to make heavy black lines on the white underglaze. He then fills in the shapes between the lines with brightly colored glazes; a process, he said, that is not all that different from working with shape, line and color in abstract painting.
Once fired, the massive pipes are shipped out of Phoenix to the new homes or to Siler’s studio.
The pipes that made their way to 11th and G are on loan to the City of LIncoln from Siler and his wife Elizabeth for the next five years.
Public Art Lincoln, the advisory board that works with the city to develop a public art collection of national prominence, will be fundraising to purchase the two artworks so they can be a permanent addition to the city’s public art collection.
Reach the writer at 402-473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com. On Twitter @KentWolgamott
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Bassam Majeed, 12, looks at a large-scale ceramic cylinder titled "Around a Gas Station" by artist Patrick Siler at 11th and G streets. Public Art Lincoln and the Lincoln Parks and Recreation Department dedicated two of Siler's ceramic cylinders on April 30, with the other work titled "The Blue Roofed House." The public art pieces are on loan for five years to the city of Lincoln from the artist and his wife, Elizabeth.
"Around a Gas Station" by Patrick Siler at the Mission Clay Products factory in Arizona.
"The Blue Roofed House" by Patrick Siler at Mission Clay Products, an industrial pipe maker in Arizona.
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