Richard Blake Shaw Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1941 -

Richard Shaw was born in Hollywood, California in 1941. He studied art at the Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, CA. between 1961 and 1963. Thereafter he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute where he received a B.F.A. degree in 1965. Further study took him to the New York College of ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, N.Y. and the University of California, Davis. At the latter school he received an M.F.A. degree in 1968. Since 1966 he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He lives and works in Fairfax, CA. Shaw’s compositions and assemblages in porcelain fool the eye as trompe-l’oeil art. He makes plaster casts of everyday objects and uses these casts to produce clay slip models that are worked into hand built or wheel-thrown forms. Sometimes he transfers images by photo-silkscreen like decals. In addition, he colors his works with glazes and stains. By shifting the uses of everyday objects out of their original contexts, Shaw induces a sense of the surreal in his works in complex ways. His ceramic art is owned by many major museums and collections. See his selected list of solo and group exhibitions documented in Directions in Contemporary American Ceramics, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1984.