The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Jeffry Mitchell is a visionary. He sees a future filled with love, joy, and happiness, and yet he knows we aren’t there yet, so he builds it with his hands. It’s too cute, over the top, precious, ethereal, cluttered, and spectacular, and I’d live there. Elephants and alligators, bears, roosters, and monkeys all get along; they play in this land. There are a few struggles, as sometimes climbing up the pots can be difficult, but they help each other and share; helping and sharing are part of this land. They cheer each other on; cheering is part of this land. Mostly, they love each other; love is everything in this land. With his eyes and heart open to world arts and crafts, Mitchell’s respect for learning materials and making is connected and embedded in sharing with the community.
Mitchell is a quintessential maker. The alphabet, children’s illustrations, and animals are all symbols of a fabulous folktale outlining an emotional container that he then floods with drawing, printmaking, and clay. Flowers, decorations, and repetitions of scalloped edges on paper, wood, and clay reappear as motifs across everything, like a heartbeat swooping up and down with curves and points, different than a vital sign wave and yet vital to his making and the connections through time.
Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1958, Mitchell’s father worked for Boeing and the military; subsequently, his family moved around the US every few years. Southwest cities like El Paso, Texas, and Alamogordo, New Mexico, made an impression on Mitchell. The patterns and colors, the cultural iconography, as well as growing up Catholic, added a distinctive sense of story and symbol to his visual vocabulary. Moving often, the shifting of place and landscape were unsettling, and yet his early learning in the classroom, the space of letters, images, and language, forged a lasting foundation. Crocheting and baking with his grandmother as a boy and watching his mother using a spritz cookie press, these notions of decoration, adornment, and care are key elements to his practice. While this story is focusing on clay, at the heart of everything, Mitchell is a mark maker. He shares, “That moment of not knowing but learning and trying to figure out is a key component of the things I’m doing—learning the alphabet, picture books, learning to read, having a fascination with language.” These are still the essence of making for Mitchell.
Happy Sad Cloudy Sunshine
In Terra Cotta Bucket of Happiness and Sadness, the essence is clear. Play, exuberance, and clustering characters glom onto the earthenware pot. Bears, also a subgroup in gay culture, proliferate in abundance. But his work is not just queer, it is as elemental as the earth, water, fire, and air, which contribute to making with clay. Mitchell has a way of appreciating all things, whether they be from other cultures, various art movements, or the multiple mediums he utilizes. Monkeys, owls, alligators, snakes, and people also decorate this pot. Along with the contrast and conflict of emotion. Happiness turns to sadness with a rotation of the form like the cycles of day and night, valleys and mountains, sunshine and clouds. Mitchell’s work traverses levels of pure joy and at times naïveté, and yet there’s a tension that holds the viewer.
We talked about an exhibition of his from 2012 at the Henry Art Gallery, a museum at the University of Washington, titled “Like a Valentine.” All of Mitchell’s show titles are tender observances, pure and sweet but not cloying. His last show at PDX Contemporary Art, his gallery in Portland, Oregon, was titled “Winter Blooming,” before that, “Elephant Medium,” and before that, “I Have a Winter Friend.” The names are also reminders of the unseen. Does one need a Valentine? In winter, will we find warmth or a friend? While researching for this story, I found several sources that describe Mitchell as a “gay folk artist.” But he’s a trained maker with degrees from the University of Dallas and an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and taught at the University of Colorado and Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s completed residencies at Long Beach State University, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and three with Township10 run by Marjorie Dial in North Carolina, to name a few. He’s lived in many parts of the Pacific Northwest and today calls Portland, Oregon, home with his partner Iván Carmona. They also share a studio in the North East Industrial neighborhood of Portland. In Like A Valentine, I was captivated by a series of tiny clay rooms filled with sexually active elephants. The rooms, housed on three glass levels inside a vitrine, are a dollhouse version of Club Z, a bathhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. The piece impressed upon me contradicting notions: whimsy and subversion, playfulness and eroticism, miniature and immensity, gentleness and intensity. What is it about desire, satisfying needs, and shame that makes us human and inevitably connects us all? He tells me, “Ultimately, what I have learned is it’s an emotional reward that comes out of making. If you want to call it healing, the practice is healing.” I consider this to be healing for both the artist and audience. “Healing from . . .?” I inquire, “healing from fear, worry, embarrassment, shame. Not necessarily healing from a trauma that was perpetrated against me in a consciously violent way. This is more a private hurt and pain that comes out of embarrassment, neediness for acceptance, approval, love, and belonging. I can feel it and I’m kind of proud of myself that I’ve made a life situation where I can do this. I can feel emotional buoyancy.”
Mitchell is almost constantly creating. If possible, he’s in his studio seven days a week for eight hours a day. He says, “That’s what humans do; a day’s work. Humans need to do a day’s work. It provides a sense of inclusion and safety, offers gratification. Humans have always made things. We have a genetic imperative to make things.” I love this perspective. It helps me feel solid on the earth. In healing and in sharing his craft, he provides that opportunity for all of us.
Influence, Appreciation, and Sharing
Mitchell lived and worked in Japan from 1981–84, teaching English and eventually apprenticing with a potter and studying calligraphy for close to two years. While in Japan, he noted the graphic space of advertising and image, and first saw Jimbo by Gary Panter, who worked with Paul Reubens as a designer on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” and was struck by the rawness of the work. But whereas Panter comes from Punk Rock, Mitchell does not. Babar, the green-suit-wearing African Elephant, is another notable character and influence for Mitchell. It’s important to stress that all histories are complex and deserve respect. Mitchell is not afraid to immerse himself in the slippery play of culturally shifting iconography to explore gently, in friendship, in community, in the present with an eye towards the future and a nod to the past.
Returning to Seattle from Japan in the mid 1980s, Mitchell saw a Frank Stella show at Seattle gallery Greg Kucera. The show, a print series called Illustrations After El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya, the latter a Yiddish folk song which closes the Passover ritual and holds themes of destruction and survival, was a colorfully chaotic, abstract interpretation of the Russian artist’s 1919 Constructivist lithographs. He tells me, “When I saw the Frank Stella show with what seemed like a million elements, I loved the freedom he created for himself, where he could go in and work and make without editing, it’s compelling, and yet hard to say what it was. I thought ‘this is the goal, to create liberated space for yourself, whatever that meant.’” Seeing an interpretation of an interpretation, like the Telephone game for making art. Mitchell is a medium of the material; he is of the earth, folky, like a puffy animal letter, a gentle giant nurturing his subjects and nourishing all who witness the work.
We talked about the ‘Graphic Space’ of advertising and print. He shares the artist Fortunato Depero and we discuss typography, advertising, and architecture. “What does symmetry mean to you?” I ask. “We are hard wired in our structure as animals.” We talk about rumps, boobs, and eyes. He continues, “When you pull a print off a plate, a kaleidoscopic Rorschach captures your attention; symmetry is a good, reliable structure.”
Everything is Inspiration
Art and artists. Letters and language. Image and ideas. Abundance and Loss. Maurice Sendak and Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens), two gay icons who geared their work towards children and yet succeeded in harnessing a universal audience, are influences for both of us. We each listened to Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interviews after Sendak had passed away and watched the recent Pee-wee Herman documentary Pee-wee as Himself.
We discussed trauma, collaboration, visual messaging, storytelling, and each artist’s ability to share their visions. Mitchell tells me, “Every child has some traumatic experiences; when you’re hypersensitive, it doesn’t have to be direct evil or violence. We all have a childhood that helplessly shapes us.” The more we spoke, it became clear how Mitchell repeats his themes, and he shares, “I’m exploring physiological and emotional landscapes over and over again. The emblems of those experiences are the alphabet, the animals, the children’s book illustrations.” How do we as makers move pain? In the act of creation we express humor, sadness, and joy. We embrace possibility. We collaborate, appreciate, we cheer, always building, sometimes destroying, but still churning the earth of our understanding.
Art making can be a way to impress beyond the outside of the self. A way to claim “I am here!” A mark, an impression, clay lends itself so easily to this. As does a variety of the media Mitchell chooses. A drawer: the mark on paper; a printmaker: the repeated impression of paper to stone, wood, or metal, or ink squeegeed through a screen; and clay: the hand pushing, manipulating the medium as though drawing in three dimensions. And the artist keeps harkening to those around them, “I’m here—can you see me?” This shout, this song, this cry, of longing to belong. Perhaps together we’re singing and chanting a ritual of living. We are all in this—together, through happiness and sadness, sunshine and clouds.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Jeffry Mitchell is a visionary. He sees a future filled with love, joy, and happiness, and yet he knows we aren’t there yet, so he builds it with his hands. It’s too cute, over the top, precious, ethereal, cluttered, and spectacular, and I’d live there. Elephants and alligators, bears, roosters, and monkeys all get along; they play in this land. There are a few struggles, as sometimes climbing up the pots can be difficult, but they help each other and share; helping and sharing are part of this land. They cheer each other on; cheering is part of this land. Mostly, they love each other; love is everything in this land. With his eyes and heart open to world arts and crafts, Mitchell’s respect for learning materials and making is connected and embedded in sharing with the community.
Mitchell is a quintessential maker. The alphabet, children’s illustrations, and animals are all symbols of a fabulous folktale outlining an emotional container that he then floods with drawing, printmaking, and clay. Flowers, decorations, and repetitions of scalloped edges on paper, wood, and clay reappear as motifs across everything, like a heartbeat swooping up and down with curves and points, different than a vital sign wave and yet vital to his making and the connections through time.
Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1958, Mitchell’s father worked for Boeing and the military; subsequently, his family moved around the US every few years. Southwest cities like El Paso, Texas, and Alamogordo, New Mexico, made an impression on Mitchell. The patterns and colors, the cultural iconography, as well as growing up Catholic, added a distinctive sense of story and symbol to his visual vocabulary. Moving often, the shifting of place and landscape were unsettling, and yet his early learning in the classroom, the space of letters, images, and language, forged a lasting foundation. Crocheting and baking with his grandmother as a boy and watching his mother using a spritz cookie press, these notions of decoration, adornment, and care are key elements to his practice. While this story is focusing on clay, at the heart of everything, Mitchell is a mark maker. He shares, “That moment of not knowing but learning and trying to figure out is a key component of the things I’m doing—learning the alphabet, picture books, learning to read, having a fascination with language.” These are still the essence of making for Mitchell.
Happy Sad Cloudy Sunshine
In Terra Cotta Bucket of Happiness and Sadness, the essence is clear. Play, exuberance, and clustering characters glom onto the earthenware pot. Bears, also a subgroup in gay culture, proliferate in abundance. But his work is not just queer, it is as elemental as the earth, water, fire, and air, which contribute to making with clay. Mitchell has a way of appreciating all things, whether they be from other cultures, various art movements, or the multiple mediums he utilizes. Monkeys, owls, alligators, snakes, and people also decorate this pot. Along with the contrast and conflict of emotion. Happiness turns to sadness with a rotation of the form like the cycles of day and night, valleys and mountains, sunshine and clouds. Mitchell’s work traverses levels of pure joy and at times naïveté, and yet there’s a tension that holds the viewer.
We talked about an exhibition of his from 2012 at the Henry Art Gallery, a museum at the University of Washington, titled “Like a Valentine.” All of Mitchell’s show titles are tender observances, pure and sweet but not cloying. His last show at PDX Contemporary Art, his gallery in Portland, Oregon, was titled “Winter Blooming,” before that, “Elephant Medium,” and before that, “I Have a Winter Friend.” The names are also reminders of the unseen. Does one need a Valentine? In winter, will we find warmth or a friend? While researching for this story, I found several sources that describe Mitchell as a “gay folk artist.” But he’s a trained maker with degrees from the University of Dallas and an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and taught at the University of Colorado and Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s completed residencies at Long Beach State University, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and three with Township10 run by Marjorie Dial in North Carolina, to name a few. He’s lived in many parts of the Pacific Northwest and today calls Portland, Oregon, home with his partner Iván Carmona. They also share a studio in the North East Industrial neighborhood of Portland. In Like A Valentine, I was captivated by a series of tiny clay rooms filled with sexually active elephants. The rooms, housed on three glass levels inside a vitrine, are a dollhouse version of Club Z, a bathhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. The piece impressed upon me contradicting notions: whimsy and subversion, playfulness and eroticism, miniature and immensity, gentleness and intensity. What is it about desire, satisfying needs, and shame that makes us human and inevitably connects us all? He tells me, “Ultimately, what I have learned is it’s an emotional reward that comes out of making. If you want to call it healing, the practice is healing.” I consider this to be healing for both the artist and audience. “Healing from . . .?” I inquire, “healing from fear, worry, embarrassment, shame. Not necessarily healing from a trauma that was perpetrated against me in a consciously violent way. This is more a private hurt and pain that comes out of embarrassment, neediness for acceptance, approval, love, and belonging. I can feel it and I’m kind of proud of myself that I’ve made a life situation where I can do this. I can feel emotional buoyancy.”
Mitchell is almost constantly creating. If possible, he’s in his studio seven days a week for eight hours a day. He says, “That’s what humans do; a day’s work. Humans need to do a day’s work. It provides a sense of inclusion and safety, offers gratification. Humans have always made things. We have a genetic imperative to make things.” I love this perspective. It helps me feel solid on the earth. In healing and in sharing his craft, he provides that opportunity for all of us.
Influence, Appreciation, and Sharing
Mitchell lived and worked in Japan from 1981–84, teaching English and eventually apprenticing with a potter and studying calligraphy for close to two years. While in Japan, he noted the graphic space of advertising and image, and first saw Jimbo by Gary Panter, who worked with Paul Reubens as a designer on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” and was struck by the rawness of the work. But whereas Panter comes from Punk Rock, Mitchell does not. Babar, the green-suit-wearing African Elephant, is another notable character and influence for Mitchell. It’s important to stress that all histories are complex and deserve respect. Mitchell is not afraid to immerse himself in the slippery play of culturally shifting iconography to explore gently, in friendship, in community, in the present with an eye towards the future and a nod to the past.
Returning to Seattle from Japan in the mid 1980s, Mitchell saw a Frank Stella show at Seattle gallery Greg Kucera. The show, a print series called Illustrations After El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya, the latter a Yiddish folk song which closes the Passover ritual and holds themes of destruction and survival, was a colorfully chaotic, abstract interpretation of the Russian artist’s 1919 Constructivist lithographs. He tells me, “When I saw the Frank Stella show with what seemed like a million elements, I loved the freedom he created for himself, where he could go in and work and make without editing, it’s compelling, and yet hard to say what it was. I thought ‘this is the goal, to create liberated space for yourself, whatever that meant.’” Seeing an interpretation of an interpretation, like the Telephone game for making art. Mitchell is a medium of the material; he is of the earth, folky, like a puffy animal letter, a gentle giant nurturing his subjects and nourishing all who witness the work.
We talked about the ‘Graphic Space’ of advertising and print. He shares the artist Fortunato Depero and we discuss typography, advertising, and architecture. “What does symmetry mean to you?” I ask. “We are hard wired in our structure as animals.” We talk about rumps, boobs, and eyes. He continues, “When you pull a print off a plate, a kaleidoscopic Rorschach captures your attention; symmetry is a good, reliable structure.”
Everything is Inspiration
Art and artists. Letters and language. Image and ideas. Abundance and Loss. Maurice Sendak and Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens), two gay icons who geared their work towards children and yet succeeded in harnessing a universal audience, are influences for both of us. We each listened to Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interviews after Sendak had passed away and watched the recent Pee-wee Herman documentary Pee-wee as Himself.
We discussed trauma, collaboration, visual messaging, storytelling, and each artist’s ability to share their visions. Mitchell tells me, “Every child has some traumatic experiences; when you’re hypersensitive, it doesn’t have to be direct evil or violence. We all have a childhood that helplessly shapes us.” The more we spoke, it became clear how Mitchell repeats his themes, and he shares, “I’m exploring physiological and emotional landscapes over and over again. The emblems of those experiences are the alphabet, the animals, the children’s book illustrations.” How do we as makers move pain? In the act of creation we express humor, sadness, and joy. We embrace possibility. We collaborate, appreciate, we cheer, always building, sometimes destroying, but still churning the earth of our understanding.
Art making can be a way to impress beyond the outside of the self. A way to claim “I am here!” A mark, an impression, clay lends itself so easily to this. As does a variety of the media Mitchell chooses. A drawer: the mark on paper; a printmaker: the repeated impression of paper to stone, wood, or metal, or ink squeegeed through a screen; and clay: the hand pushing, manipulating the medium as though drawing in three dimensions. And the artist keeps harkening to those around them, “I’m here—can you see me?” This shout, this song, this cry, of longing to belong. Perhaps together we’re singing and chanting a ritual of living. We are all in this—together, through happiness and sadness, sunshine and clouds.
To learn more about Jeffry Mitchell and his gallery, visit pdxcontemporaryart.com and follow his Instagram @jeffrymitchell.
the author Erin Shafkind is an artist and educator living in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, visit www.erinshafkind.com and Instagram @eshaffy.
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