Today we’d like to introduce you to Alan Lerner.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Alan. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I began my study and practice in art back in high school, which grew from my parents’ interest in seeing and creating their own art as a hobby. As a youngster, I was introduced to playing the violin at the age of 10.
From this, I progressed to guitar at 13, after seeing the Beatles and Rolling Stones on television. I followed I joined my friends into drawing album covers of prominent bands while organizing and collaborating countless band projects through high school, college until recently. My visual art was nurtured further by supportive, progressive teachers in high school. Visual art, along with rock and roll became for me, a fountain of rebellion and liberation, which also lead to political activism in my early college years and subsequently, I was drafted, in the last year of the Vietnam War call-up. Serving in a hospital in the Chicago suburbs, I began taking classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
At school, along with artist friends, we formed the Art Institute marching band, Thunder and Blazes, performing at anti-Nixon demonstrations and various inane school functions, leading up to participating in the Wisconsin high school and college jazz festival, and juried by the jazz vibes player Gary Burton, who described us as a comedy act, which pleased us greatly. These early experiences combining visual art, music, and politics, became a foundation of my concerns as an artist. While studying at SAIC, I worked in steel, drawing with various materials and print media. I also met my wife of 41 years, Aviva Alter and through my relationship with her, began studying clay as an art medium.
Focusing on clay, I learned to throw pots on the wheel, decorating, glazing and firing my work. Aviva and I formed a pottery and produced and sold ceramic work across the country. I began teaching in 1980 and taught at Lill Street in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, teaching all aspects of ceramics and screen printing, which I learned while a graduate student at SAIC. My family upbringing and my experience of the Vietnam war led to an interest in combining ideas in art, music, and life into a practice that reflected my ideas on social justice, psychology, and humor.
Currently, I am working again in clay, using the print media techniques I’ve learned, creating pots with printed imagery. The computer has become one of my main tools to process and create this imagery. The pottery I am making combines aspects of the Asian pottery aesthetics I was exposed to as a student and pottery apprentice, with a love for mid-century design. I am trying to tie these influences together in a body of work that is architectonic and elegantly humorous. Warp Ceramic is the name of my pottery company. I am producing both handbuilt and wheel thrown pots, with decoration directly using brush media(colored slips, underglaze) and screen printed images.
Marketing the work will be a combination of exhibiting at occasional wholesale craft shows, blogging and finding other blogs and magazines to talk about my work. I am trying to work at the same time in sculpture and mixed media drawing that are interdisciplinary, when I am not working on my more commercial clay work. I feel this is important in enriching my life and avoiding a practice that is limited to marketing concerns. This is a journey that takes me back through all of my life experiences and influential teachers with whom I have studied.
Has it been a smooth road?
I have had a good life in that I’ve had support from my family which has helped getting me through some tough times. The hardest times have usually been involved with my own self-perception in making a living. I have taught at different schools on a part-time basis all through my career, I’ve been employed as a museum guard, museum and gallery installation and transport worker, kitchen/restaurant food preparation, and picture framer. I have been pretty rebellious and might have been more thoughtful regarding suggested studies of graphic design and medical illustration–these would have offered me more choices.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Warp Ceramic is an umbrella for exhibiting and selling all of the varied types of art that Aviva and I create. Pottery, hand-dyed scarves and clothing, prints, tiles, and sculpture. Lately, I have been designing and manufacturing pottery and tiles in clay, with applied decoration created in photoshop from my drawings and photos.
Using the computer has offered a limitless source of workable imagery. Right now we are using our separate websites to show our work, but soon we’ll be setting up a new website with our more marketable work.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I do feel like Chicago can support art and applied art(decorative), but in the past, I’ve had an easier time in other cities. Chicago is still a little more conservative than the east or west coast, so I want to try these markets also. I am interested in living on the west coast–I just want to escape harsh winters in the mid-west and be outside more often.
Pricing:
- $80 – $ 600. tiles, pottery
- $100 and up- prints and drawings
Contact Info:
- Address: 4320 N. Bell Ave Chicago, IL 60618
- Website: alanlerner.com
- Phone: 773-771-7812
- Email: albomatic@gmail.com
- Instagram: @lerneralan
- Facebook: Alan Lerner
Image Credit:
Tom van Eynde
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