KIRCHMAN GALLERY
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Polly Ulrich, Chicago Art Critic Essay on Ron Starr

Ron Starr's poetic gestures enliven every aspect of his art.  Starr's stoneware sculptural vessels, wall murals and Glass Trees exude a fluid energy.  At every point in the making of his art, Starr exploits clay and Glass's malleability and produces a rich, dense repertory of surface decoration by hand to propel a sense of power and movement into his work.  The art fairly vibrates. It is humanistic. With every drip or slash of color, with every twist or slump of the pot as it is formed by the artist or as it endures the vicissitudes of a gas firing at about 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, Starr's art presents itself as a chronicle of human action. This is art which emphasizes the importance of the act of creating as much as the finished art object.  It stands as a reminder of the artist Robert Irwin's comment, "There's no such thing as a neutral gesture." Starr, who works out of a 3,000 square foot studio in Lake Zurich, Illinois, has developed his gestural art in Tree vessels, window pieces, wall sculptures and large-scale murals. For the last couple of years, using glass, he has explored the theme of colorful Trees, after understanding the issues of our forests.  Starr then produced-not tiny, precious receptacles-but typically loose, large and rangy containers with matching titles.  Fall (2007), for example, is 22 inches high-a Tree vessel with uninhibited, beautifully-colored abstract surface and lines which Starr applied to the mold.  Extending the jest, he then decided to scale down the bold Trees to a "mere" 12 inches in height-with his witty "Mini Series," producing work such as Little Sprout, a smaller version with a decidedly large presence. Starr, who was born in 1958 in Chicago and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980, has been exploring the vessel form for years.  After more than a decade of producing open-topped containers, he began to toy with closing them completely.  His initial effort was the "Zorb Series," a group of vessel sculptures with closed rounded tops which look as though they are about to pop, as in the 41-inch-tall Blacktower (2003) or the adroitly-named Explosion (2003).  These works have a vigorous physical stance that comes from the energy and pressure which is implied from within them.  In order to further animate these forms, a second series of "Zorbs"-called "Zorbs Come to Life"-featured tiny DVD video tapes shot and edited by Starr embedded in the puffed tops.  One, Eyeforart (2003), featured a video close-up of a human eye.

Starr has persisted in closing his vessel forms in yet more idiosyncratic ways.  His newest perfume bottles have extraordinary stoppers, some of which are almost as tall as the containers themselves.  The stoppers, constructed of torn and manipulated segments of clay, tower over the bases, allowing Starr to emphasize even more dramatically the movement and lively poses in his art.  This work represents a cleverly-orchestrated balance of elements: the action of the surface decoration, the energetic posture of the pot and the exaggerated gesture of the stopper all come together in one fluid continuous whole.  Starr's murals continue that sense of malleability and gesture which also appears in his vessels.  But because of their two-dimensionality, the murals perhaps best show the influence of Abstract Expressionism on his art.  This art movement, propounded by a group of American painters including Jackson Pollack in the 1940s and 1950s, relied on the spontaneous, authentic and abstract gesture in large-scale works to convey tragic and grand psychological themes.  Perhaps because of the flatness of Starr's murals, they more starkly display that Abstract Expressionist turbulence and exhilaration built into the clay surface by the artist's hand.  Starr's murals are incised, dripped on, splashed with colored clay slips, and shaped by hand.  The surfaces are sprayed with oxides, wax, soda ash, salt and water.  Lately, Starr has investigated the use of glass in his art.  His latest murals, titled the "Plank and Panel Series," feature large, ice-like drips of molten glass frozen into place on slabs of fired clay. The sense of freshness and spontaneity in Starr's work is deceptive.  Starr relies on improvisation rather than detailed, previously-drawn-up plans to construct his art, working within the moment and responding to the clay in a kind of dialogue as it changes under his hands.  In that regard, Starr maintains a truly process-driven art practice that blends both ideas and materials into a single whole.  But, perhaps contrarily, it should be recognized that Starr's elusive quality of spontaneity comes primarily from his many years of experience in the studio, and is the result of technical expertise that comes as much from an authentic ability to control the medium as from instinctively knowing when to let it speak for itself.

Polly Ulrich
Chicago Art Critic

Over the years Polly has written analyses and reviews on contemporary art for a wide number of national and international art publications, including Sculpture magazine, frieze, American Craft, Keramik Magazine, Bridge, Metalsmith, Fiberarts, Surface Design Journal, The New Art Examiner and Ceramics Art and Perception. She has lectured about art, served on panels and juried and curated exhibitions.  Before turning to art criticism, she worked as a freelance journalist, writing for The New York Times, Newsweek, Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times and the Milwaukee Journal.