Lanning Gallery: Art in All Forms [Sedona Arizona]

Russ Vogt - A featured artist at the Lanning Gallery [Sedona Arizona]
Designed for indoor or outdoor display, Russ Vogt’s vividly colored ceramic pole sculptures are a reflection of the artist himself. The pieces can be mischievous, quiet and provocative, all at the same time. And peeking through the sensitivity to color, light and form is a secret sense of humor, a good-natured belief in the goodness of life.

The components of these abstract sculptures are playful large-scale extruded, wheel-thrown, and hand-built earthenware forms. The tube-like colorful components are stacked spontaneously on an underlying steel pipe structure. They can be seen as individuals, configured as fences, clustered together, or mounted on concrete walls.

It is the joyous love of colors laid next to one another that dominates and distinguishes Vogt’s work. Living in a deeply wooded area, the land around him serves as a beginning of these sculptural forms; from that point Vogt allows his imagination to complete the journey to locations of his own creation. The artist’s parents grew up during the Depression and his grandparents were family farmers; this meant that Vogt was raised not only with an appreciation of land and its natural forms but with the useful lessons of ‘making do’ and ‘figuring things out.’ He learned early to use tools to make and fix things and, today, this mechanical prowess serves him well.

"Yellow-Throated Redhead"
Ceramic Sculpture
46
" x 14" x 14"

Vogt figured out early that it is necessary to fire the pieces in his ceramic sculptures far longer than with traditional indoor works, so they can be placed outside; so the clay is hard and vitreous enough not to absorb moisture. His clay also must be heavy-duty to withstand the weight of stacking his various components. Saturated jewel tones in intense color patches complete each totem-like sculpture.

"Three Sailors"
Ceramic Sculpture
73" x 29" x 24"

“I like it when things are not so literal,” Vogt says. “I like the quality where you can look at something and fill in the blanks.” When imagining his work placed outdoors it is the interaction of his colorful abstract sculptures against a natural landscape that particularly excites him. His ceramic sculptures, with colors arrived at emotionally instead of from the observation of nature, become as organic as any living organism – breathing perennial life into every surrounding in which they are set.

Click on a sculpture
to see a larger view.

 

Artist's prices beginning at $1,200.

"Arch Friends"
Ceramic Sculpture
66
" x 23" x 18"

 

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