Michael Gustavson "Eclipse 14" Glazed Ceramic, Abstract Crescent Sculpture in Orange and Olive, Carmel California Art, Original 10 X 20 Inches, 2025

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A leaf-like crescent rises on a slate-blue base, its upper face white with fine crackle and crossed by a big … Read more A leaf-like crescent rises on a slate-blue base, its upper face white with fine crackle and crossed by a big sweep of orange. Yellow, teal and a dark green disc crowd the left, and black lines trace diagonals across the planes. The back of the form is a smooth olive green that swells into a soft belly, quite different from the busy front, so the piece changes character as you walk around it. A red-orange dot at the foot repeats the warmth above. Gustavson has long pursued color that is unusually vivid for ceramic, and the saturated orange against calm olive shows it clearly. The gloss is high and the edge crisp.

Orange and olive suit a warm living room, a study or a dining room, where they pair with walnut, leather, rust and cream. The slate base helps it sit calmly on a console or a shelf. Because the back is as appealing as the front, it works well on a coffee table or a pedestal in the middle of a room.

Glazed ceramic, 10 x 20 x 6 in (25.4 x 50.8 x 15.2 cm).

Gustavson approaches clay as a painter-sculptor, using glaze as his paint. Surfaces are built from layers of glaze, texture and color, with crackle, controlled drips and thin drawn lines, then fired to a rich, glossy finish. His firing approach grew out of raku during more than four decades of practice. His vessels are wheel-thrown and stretched by hand, and the same painterly method extends to towers, benches and tall columns.

Michael Gustavson is a ceramic artist based in Murphys, California, who has worked in clay for more than four decades. He earned his MFA from San Jose State University in 1980 and describes himself as a painter-sculptor, treating each form as a three-dimensional canvas and glaze as his paint. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide, including IBM, Kaiser Permanente, Seagate, Cranbrook Museum and Eastman Kodak.

Building on the traditional Japanese process of raku, he developed his own firing approach, leaving large pieces in the kiln and introducing pine needles at lower temperatures to create reduction. The method allows larger scale and unusually vivid color. His wheel-thrown, hand-stretched vessels suggest the figure in motion, his wall reliefs use fragmented slabs and negative space, and recent outdoor sculptures and benches carry his surfaces into tectonic forms, with nods to Miró, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Pollock. See less