mediums used: clay, plaster, glass, marker
low price range: $2,500
high price range: $10,000
I had to change the title from artists who paint food to artists who portray food. Another artist who inserts humor into his works, mainly thru ceramics although he has also done a fair amount of prints.
The artist was born in 1943 in Auburn, California. He was an artist of the Funk Art movement in the 1960s. The movement sought to bring humor and fun to subjects, to give them a character so to speak. He developed a style that focuses on the food and the interaction among frogs.
The artist attended college earning both a bachelor degree and master’s degree from the University of California at Davis. His favorite professor was Roy DeForest who also became his mentor. The student became a teacher himself at the college level at his alma mater, the University of Saskatchewan, and San Jose State College. He became part of Funk Art Movement which was a collective of ceramicists mainly active in the San Francisco Bay area.
His first job directly after college was as a watercolor instructor at San Jose State College. He didn’t own a kiln at the time, but wanted to work with large animals. For the structure he used chicken wire and covered it with wheatpaste. He had a number of bad experiences while working with paper mache seeing some works get moldy with exposure to the elements and another time a piece was folded in half due to wind while he was transporting it! He went on to anger the his fellow faculty members and was not fired only because he was so newly hired. He was put on probation for teaching such demonstrative ideas of how to use watercolor. He went on to “break” the rules of watercolor and paper mache at other collegiate teaching engagements.
Studied with famed figure sculptor Manuel Neri. Neri will be included in my sculpture section coming up soon!
In 1982 Gilhooly did some work using Plexiglass as his medium.
The artist is included in museums from Honolulu, Hawaii to the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City as well as museums in the Netherlands and Canada.
This artist inserts a great deal of fun and comedy into his works. In the mid 1990s he quit working in clay and moved to working with shadowboxes.
He currently lives in Newport, Oregon.
website for the artist: http://www.davidgilhooly.com/
The website is full of much more information and the artist will respond personally if you ask a question. He doesn’t work full time in ceramics anymore, but you can be added to a mailing list notifying you when new works are available.
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