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In the realm of ceramics, Ken Price wasn't just an artist—he was a rebel, transcending the traditional boundaries that confined his medium. Refusing the label of ceramicist, Price defined his process as "fired and painted clay," a realm that boldly declared his distance from the conventional craft domain. In the early '80s, he abandoned glazes altogether, crafting clay forms that metamorphosed into vibrant expressions of color and gesture, almost extraterrestrial in their allure.

The surf-stoked Cool School maestro orchestrated his creations with meticulous plans, applying up to 75 layers of acrylic paint, even resorting to sanding surfaces for polychromic patina. Price's works drew comparisons to everything from Murano glass to melted plastic, pushing the boundaries of what clay and painting could coalesce into.


In his own words, Price shed light on his process: "First, I make them; then I surface them; then I fire them; and then I paint and sand them." His approach to color was experimental, a constant pursuit of new hues. Grains embedded in the clay played a pivotal role, creating nodes that held the paint, resulting in a seamless fusion of surface and color.

The four artists featured in "Painted, Fired Clay"—Brad Eberhard, Nick McPhail, Chris Miller, and Aili Schmeltz—tread a path where glaze meets the unintended, echoing Price's mentor, Peter Voulkos. Though they embrace the explosive nature of the kiln, their essence lies in a painterly appreciation for form, color, and gesture.

Brad Eberhard, renowned for geometric and figurative abstraction, weaves color into totemic objects that blur the lines between human, animal, and architecture. “I absolutely love color. I find it independent of language, psychological, emotional, ineffable,” he says. “I feel like a lot of my abstract paintings resolve because they kind of look like a building or an animal or an animal that looks like a building. Now I'm just making those things, so it sort of feels like eliminating a middleman.”

 The same is true for Aili Schmeltz, a sculptor and painter who lives between Los Angeles and the High Desert of California. She is known for her mixed media textile paintings and modular ceramic sculptures that incorporate earthy glazes into interlocking architectures that stand between the tropes of California and relics of the future. “There's some sort of language that is kind of imprinted in me from childhood. My family is all from Finland, a family of worlders, who grow their own food, build their own houses, make their own clothes and furniture,” says Schmeltz. The modularity of the pieces influences her approach to painting her clay works. “My paintings are very much objects because I come from a sculpture background, but my biggest pet peeve is looking at the sides of paintings and seeing when people don't address the sides of their paintings. That drives me absolutely bananas, so I'm coming from that framework that it's all just objects.”

The merger of object and gesture is just as prevalent, if more abstract and free-flowing, in the work of Chris Miller, who splits time between San Luis Obispo and Long Beach. Miller gravitates toward “surfaces and the wealth of information” clay provides in his volcanic, heaving forms. “I like to smush things around and push things around. I like spilling and dripping, and all the phenomenon of material and clay just gives that to you in oodles,” says Miller. Though most of his work finds its home on a floor, he does make some wall works that take on the form shields made of color fields of aggregate. “I just like the format of paintings on the wall. I like the imaginary space that they can create. Of course, the color and the texture and all of that is a fascinating challenge for me. It's hard, and I think that's probably another reason why I try to engage in it.”

LA-based painter and sculptor Nick McPhail seamlessly merges functional-seeming ceramics with painted scenes of LA life, breaking free from the confines of the rectangular frame. In McPhail's words, "With painting, I’m mostly thinking about the difference between the way the eye sees and the way the camera sees...What I noticed with ceramics is that I can get outside the rectangle in a way that is closer to the way the eye actually sees."

Price, too, wanted interaction with his work. “I’d actually like people to be able to touch the work, so they can experience its textures and marks and realize that the thing is made out of layers of painted color that are integral, not just applied.” While the texture and marks are integral to the works in this survey, the gesture is no less integral.

As these artists build upon Price's framework, what he called “spontaneous invention of new techniques,” their creations echo his ethos—an evolution with clay as it's painted and fired, merging two mediums with infinite possibilities.