Jeffry Mitchell – rigor wrapped in play

In the catalog for Dirt On Delight: Impulses That Form Clay now at the Walker, co-curator Jennelle Porter wrote about Jeffry Mitchell:

The repetitive labor required to make such works is apparent, and one of the many themes in Mitchell’s work along with redemption, transcendence, sex, death and hope.

She refers to Mitchell’s high style featured in Dirt, such as his rococo fortress of a pickle jar from 2005. (Click to enlarge.)

Currently at the James Harris Gallery, 49 pots serve as examples of his low.

They include Green Peony, 2009, Lead-glazed earthenware.

Thirteen delicate yet fluid drawings of flowers in colored pencil accompany them. If a soap bubble could draw, it would aspire to create them. Barely there, they are their own de Koonings erased by their own Rauschenbergs.

Mitchell is, in the primary sense, a maker. In the middle of a description, he might unconsciously begin to draw it in the air, thinking with his hands. The history of the world he remembers through its colors, lines and densities. When he thinks of Alfred Sisley, he sees the sky reflected in Sisley’s fish scales. When he thinks of Dickens, he mentally toys with the sagging mass of Miss Haversham’s cake.

What Whitney Balliett wrote about gut bucket jazz applies to Mitchell: His feet are in the mud, but his head is full of celestial things. He owes his casual grace to bountiful skill. He drapes the shaggy world in silks and puts a top hat on the tawdry.

He likes alphabet drawings and Betty Crocker bake-offs; Chinese pots and Renaissance porcelain as well as Pop art and back-to-future Futurism. He casts a fond eye on country potters, Mickey Mouse, Babar and Curious George. He loves comic books and the militantly upbeat graphics of the Russian Constructivists. His gift is his ability to turn a chaos of sources into a coherent visual stream.

Low for him is not the same as plain. His 49 pots emerged from the rich terrain of his concerns. Incised into the surface of the clay are flowers, animals (especially birds, butterflies, bears, bunnies, monkeys and elephants from children’s books), sentries, auspicious charms (horseshoe, 4-leaf clover) and messages, such as HELLO HELLO, from the Beatles’ song, and JM for himself. He was here. He made this.

As in the Tang Dynasty, his figures are awash in colored glazes that run down the round shape or vase or jug, but he also dips into the traditions of English cream ware, the salt glazes of American South and Ming blue, into which he tends to float scribbles of white clouds.

In Mitchell’s low style, his pots lack their foot, a sign that they are for the people.

When artists consider the early 20th-century divide between Picasso and Duchamp, many who are currently prominent side with Duchamp. Not Mitchell.

Picasso, via.

Mitchell, below. Note the stigmata. Although his work has a Chinese Buddhist heart that expresses the cycle of suffering leading to enlightenment, he was raised Catholic, and its imagery is a constant.

Like David Hockney, Mitchell can draw, paint or sculpt anything he wants, whatever occurs to him to make in clay, latex, glass, wood and various plastics; on canvas, paper, old metals and on the surface of notes, restaurant bills and books.

While Hockney increasingly distracts himself with technology, Mitchell sticks to the flesh, to life and death, to youth and beauty, to sex as joy (exuberant and excessive) and as a kind of death swoon (barely there).

Gerald Gerard Manley Hopkins, from The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo:

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,/ Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks,/ lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace/ — Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,/ And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver/ Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death/ Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver./ See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair/ Is, hair of the head, numbered.