American Craft

June/July
1996

BY ROBERT SILBERMAN

Michelangelo, at the quarries in Carrara, no doubt felt aesthetic lust in his heart when he saw the blocks of marble being carved out of the hillside for his use. Arshile Gorky, even when he was a classic example of the poverty-stricken, starving artist, haunted the art supply stores and found a way to buy large quantities of the finest, most expensive brushes. I once saw the painter Russell Chatham lovingly, almost ecstatically, unroll a huge piece of canvas that he had special-ordered from Europe and just received, and was about to transform into an immense landscape commissioned by the Museum of the Rockies.

The Minnesota artist Judy Onofrio has a slightly different approach to acquiring the materials for her art. You see, she has this thing about house sales: she's never met one she didn't like. And when she returns, the spoils are not a block of marble just waiting to have the figure inside liberated, or a handful of beautiful brushes, or a pristine canvas calling out for the first touch of paint. No, more likely she has acquired a bunch of cookie tins, some busted-up old wood furniture, a batch of costume jewelry, and a few unmatched china plates nobody else wanted and which she was therefore able to buy for a song.

For a long time, Onofrio's love of collecting was just a sideshow, with no direct bearing on her work. Finally, however, her vocation as an artist came together with her avocation as a collector, and all that stuff she'd been gathering since her childhood days picking up seashells on the beach suddenly became the stuff of art. "I've been an artist for 30 years," Onofrio has said. "But it's only in the last five years that I finally got it. Of course, I've always worked like a demon."

The "it" in question, the breakthrough leading to the major work of recent years, joins Onofrio's unabashed collecto-mania and the wide range of skills she has acquired as an artist, beginning with ceramics in the late 60s. "I was seduced by clay," she says. She never liked throwing, but loved the relation between working clay and kneading bread (a familiar comparison, as she well knows) and, more important, between lumps of clay and body parts. Clay, however, had a problem. It wasn't "big enough" for her. She did some large wall pieces, hearts that had nothing to do with Valentine's Day but, like much of her work, were sexy, full of suggestiveness in the way the sensuous surfaces resembled skin, with enticing, voluptuous folds.

 

photo:  Paul, Babe and Sport the Reversible Dog,  1996, mixed media,  41 1/2 x 22 x 8 1/2 inches,  photo credit: Gus Gustafson Copyright American Craft Council Jun/Jul 1996