Giorgio Nagle

Ron Nagle is a ceramicist born in San Francisco in 1939. He grew up in the Mission district and graduated from San Francisco State College. His artistic direction came from exposure to Ken Price and the Ferus Gallery artists. His mother had a ceramics studio in the basement, where she and her friends made figurines using techniques like slip casting, china painting, decals, all the techniques used by Nagle himself. He creates clay sculptures with fine edges and rods protruding from the middle, these elegant structures are small but pack a punch with its magnificent color magnitude and sense of balance and control. The colors of his glazes are fired multiple times with china paint overglaze. He cites as seminal influences the work of Giorgio
He rests his sculptures atop a delicate platform, used to be an abstract to the paintings on the surface, highlighting them for the viewer’s pleasure. Nagle often sprays 20 to 30 layers of china pain overglaze, firing the piece every time. With this method, the vibrancy of the glaze is shown with bright intensity for a vivid visual appeal. His objective is to combine elegance and awkwardness with a certain unattainable presence and beauty, something that can’t be figured out but looks like something you know. His sculpting begins as just and hand sculpted element, is slip casted, carved and fitted to each other, and finished with many firings of china paint for an exquisite piece. Balance and emphasis are key in Nagle’s sculptures with the crazy control of color in his abstract pieces. Nagle’s personal favorite is a piece he calls “Flat Bastard,” a double-humped Army green bottle with a cherry red cap, a dripping purple line skirting along the gray-colored clay body like pastry icing, using the dripped glaze and exposed clay elements from 16th century Momoyama ceramics. This sculpture has a very glossy finish and has great texture with the driving over glaze on the out skirt of the piece. The contrast of the dark army green and the bright red have your attention directed to the middle valley of the double