“Two days later, after he passed away, I ordered 1,000 pounds of clay, and got my own wheel.” You’ve got to start working in clay again,’” Whyman recalls. “I talked to him a couple days before he died, and he said, ‘you’ve got to listen to me. He studied art, on full scholarship, at the University of Miami and Kansas City Art Institute, and in the 1970s he formed a mentee relationship with legendary artist Peter Voulkos, in Whyman’s words “the Jackson Pollock of ceramics.” It was Voulkos who instilled in Whyman the possibilities of clay, and it was Voulkos who reaffirmed them from his deathbed. When I was 6 or 7, I was painting and drawing and going out into the mud and ditches, making things.” He was 10 years old when construction began on the Gateway Arch, cementing his lifelong love of steel. Louis, when he would spend his allowance on plaster and clay so he could “make a mess upstairs. Whyman calls art his “calling,” one that has driven him since childhood, in St. “It’ll be nice to see that in front of a tax building,” he says, noting that the sculpture was recently purchased by Palm Beach County Tax Collector Anne Gannon. (Whyman also gifted one of his sculptures to the museum’s permanent collection.) His vessels are one aspect of an impressive oeuvre that stretches from painting to steel-like his epic “Innocent Love,” a towering re-telling of the Biblical creation story sans the devil’s temptations instead, the angular, semi-abstract figure of Eve hands Adam a maple leaf. Though he has enjoyed 23 solo exhibitions, in various mediums, since 1976, Whyman’s ceramics have earned most of the artist’s attention lately, thanks to a solo show this past winter at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. I call it my explosive creative outburst.”Īs a result, he says, “you just don’t know what the thing is going to look like until you open it up. “A lot of artists will go away for three hours, and come back the next day, and add shapes, more like a constructivist. “I’ve learned to let the clay tell me what it wants to do,” says the 67-year-old artist, from his capacious studio near Arts Warehouse. They sway one way or another, the dried paint on their surfaces in a state of perpetual drip, earthen shards jutting out where you’d least expect to find them.Īfter 50 years in clay, Whyman still enjoys the surprises in his unpredictable process. God, Gaia and the universe are all present in this local artist’s eclectic oeuvreĭelray Beach artist Jeff Whyman describes his work as “intergalactic.” His ceramic vessels-abstract mutations of teapots, vases and plates-do indeed resemble amalgamations of space debris hurtling through the cosmos.Ĭreated from wood-fired kilns and festooned with sea glass, Chinese crystals, mineral oxides, metal nails, and wood ash from trees like cedar, oak and walnut, his offbeat creations almost seem to have minds of their own.
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