Renowned Ceramics Artist Visits Upper School

After going to school every day for 60 years (and teaching for 40 of those years), Tony Hepburn, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Ceramics Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, will be retiring in May. Hepburn gave his last lecture at Cranbrook Schools today to a group of Upper School students who are taking fine arts courses.

Upper School Ceramics Instructor Joe Smith, who studied with Hepburn at the CAA, mentioned in his introduction that Hepburn was once chased by men with swords and, on another occasion, hit by a whale.

While Hepburn did not expand upon these stories, he did give the students insight into the plentiful experiences he has had as an artist. Growing up in England, his art teacher encouraged him to attend a unique art high school where the learning philosophy was "If you can find what someone is really interested in, you can teach them anything through that conduit."

He excelled in high school and went on to study painting in college. At the time, "crafts" such as ceramics and fibers were not highly regarded, but Hepburn soon met a colleague who invited him to make a pot. Hepburn explains that up until this point he had been painting human figures, still lifes, and landscapes. The experience of manipulating clay led him to transfer to the ceramics department.

"Everything I was painting was based on something out there, something I can check. Now when making a pot there was nothing. I had to make a decision. Making a pot was the first abstract decision I had ever made in my life," Hepburn says. "It was the responsibility and the abstractness that led me to use clay in my work."

Along with showing some photos of his work, Hepburn described some of his thought processes when creating his pieces. Hepburn says, "My work has always been very connected with my life." For example, he once attended a psychology lecture at the University of Michigan in which the audience was asked not to think about a blue door. "We had no choice but to think about it," Hepburn says. He incorporated this experience into his first show at Cranbrook by painting the exhibit entrance blue.

He showed his sense of humor when talking about how he built a vessel that was large enough for him to be in. He spent several hours inside it at the exhibit opening, bringing books to occupy the time. Every so often, someone would approach and say, "What the hell is that?" He would then reply from inside, "What do you think it is?" His message was "Stop using your retina" and start thinking about the abstract.

Hepburn's work is in many private and public collections around the world, including the Cranbrook Art Museum. Hepburn has received many awards for his work, including The Distinguished Koopman Fine Arts Chair from Hartford University, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Friends of Contemporary Ceramics, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two New York Council on the Arts Fellowships, and was awarded the Gold Medal at the Faenza Ceramics Biennale, Faenza, Italy. He is the co-author of a book about his mentor, Robert Turner: Shaping Silence: A Life in Clay.

For more information about Hepburn, click here.