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Oct. 14, 2011
Artistic affinity for life’s surprises
Larry Cohen’s return to ceramics combines tradition and whimsy.
OLGA LIVSHIN
These days, the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery looks like a sophisticated pottery shop. Even before Larry Cohen’s solo ceramics show, Clay Shapes, opened on Oct. 6, red dots, each one indicating a sale, decorated more than a dozen plates and vases currently on display. “I get lots of red dots. It’s like measles – unexpected,” Cohen joked.
A Renaissance man at heart, Cohen could never select one vocation at the cost of everything else, he told the Independent at the gallery. His interests have always been varied and intertwined. “I made few deliberate choices in my life,” he said. “I often fell into things or got pushed in a certain direction. If I liked the direction, I kept going. If I didn’t like it, I stopped.”
Indeed, the directions of Cohen’s life have fluctuated widely. Before he dedicated himself to the art of ceramics, he had been a criminal lawyer and a commercial fisherman, a University of British Columbia law instructor and a building contractor. He had tried his hands at carpentry, been a sculptor and managed a Japanese restaurant. “Life is interesting when you try many different things,” he said. “I’ve been lucky to be able to do what I wanted.”
Whatever he did professionally, his art always existed in parallel to his other careers, although his involvement with ceramics started as a happenstance. He was 27 at the time and a practising lawyer. “I had a friend interested in ceramics,” he recalled. “He had a wheel in his home. When he moved to a cheaper place, I rented that house and started playing with clay. I liked it. It was something to balance my life.”
In the following years, Cohen worked predominantly at functional pottery: mugs, platters and the like. But the inner artist in him strived for more: more diversity, more artistry, more knowledge. About a decade later, while teaching in the UBC faculty of law, he went back to school, his own alma mater, for his master’s in fine arts.
“I made sculpture through my school[ing],” he said, explaining that he stayed away from ceramics for many years. “I tried to move my interest in the more artistic direction.” He created and exhibited sculptures made of metal and other materials.
But his first love, ceramics, wouldn’t let him be. Clay beckoned and, eventually, Cohen returned to his artistic roots, although he fashioned his tale of return as a practical move. “I have a house full of sculptures, and I can’t sell them. But like any artist, I want appreciation. I want people to see what I do.”
Cohen’s current exhibition consists of two kinds of pottery. One is wheel-thrown: vases, jars and platters. Another is slab work, where a potter builds his creations like a sculptor, from thin slabs of clay. Several of the more unusual vases in the gallery are constructed in this technique. “It’s easier to work with a wheel,” Cohen noted. “And the process is more fluid, meditative. You can relax and enjoy it. Making slab is physically harder. But I like all of it, every stage of the process. The only part that I dislike is cleaning up the kilns – dirty job.”
He has two kilns in his studio on Cortes Island and he spends a great deal of time there. Many customers who buy Cohen’s pottery on Cortes or on Granville Island in Vancouver are attracted by his signature combination of tradition and whimsy. “I have quite a few vases with holes in them. Holes sometimes mean violence. Other times, they mean mystery,” he said.
Despite working with ceramics for many years, Cohen is still intrigued by the medium and its capricious nature. “My pieces often surprise me,” he said. “When I start, I have a vague idea of what I want, but clay dictates its own rules; you can’t just do what you want, and the firing process is unpredictable. Of course, an artist develops his own esthetics but, sometimes, you use the same shape and the same glaze and the results are different after the firing. No two pieces are the same. I like it…. You can’t control one hundred percent what comes out of the kiln, the same way you can’t control your life one hundred percent. There are always surprises. I respect that.”
Although ceramics are at the forefront of Cohen’s life now, it’s not enough to satisfy his multifaceted nature. He hasn’t abandoned his previous occupations. “I still do some carpentry,” he admitted. “And law. Because I’m a lawyer, I serve on the board of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association…. Since I was a young lawyer, I realized that law is not perfect, sometimes it hurts people. The association is trying to fix that, to push the government to adopt better laws.”
Clay Shapes is at the Zack Gallery until Oct. 30.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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