Jack Earl

In the mid-1960s Jack Earl was introduced to the world of European figurative ceramics through illustrated books in the Toledo Museum of Art's library. An art education and ceramics teacher at the museum, he was particularly attracted by the Watteau-like, painted porcelain figurines manufactured at Meissen during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He admired their rococo fantasy and sensuality, and was intrigued by their story-telling qualities.

By the early 1970s, Earl was creating his own representational hard-paste porcelains, But instead of the aristocratic imagery favored at Meissen, his own minutely detailed pieces depicted things, scenes, and people drawn first from the whimsical realms of his own imagination, and then from the more mundane world around him. By the end of the decade, Jack Earl had transformed the European tradition into a thoroughly modern and American idiom. Instead of sentimental, or idealized representations, he crafted startlingly real—and oftentimes surreal—characters and objects.

The subjects of Earl's porcelain sculptures generally are based upon the circumscribed lives and lifestyles of people in his own culturally isolated, small-town world in Ohio. Typically, his ceramic personalities are engaged in humdrum activities in vernacular surroundings. But while he represents life in rural Middle America, he does not depict it from the disassociated vantage point of a social commentator, satirist, or folklorist. Instead, Earl revels in his role as an active participant in ordinary affairs, and while he often pokes fun in his art, he always remains a sensitive recorder of the human condition. Attuned to the metaphoric and symbolic content of the prosaic lives around him, his porcelain individuals are often elevated to the status of Everyman.