PETER LENZO AND HIS SON’S
ASSIST By
Wim Roefs
“I
made my dad famous,” Joe Scotchie-Lenzo used to say about the ceramic artist
Peter Lenzo.
“He
started saying that right away,” says his dad.
He
still does. “I like to take credit for it,” Scotchie-Lenzo says, grinning.
Of
course, Lenzo already had a considerable reputation, mostly with his
cabinet-like altarpieces filled with found objects and personal mementos and slowly,
also, for more traditional-looking face jugs steeped in Southern tradition. But
Lenzo’s son did steer his dad in the direction he now is known for nationally –
highly embellished, at times frightening ceramic figures and faces adorned with
found and created objects sticking in and out of bodies and faces that are at
times unrecognizable as the face jugs from which they originate. The adornments
range from ceramic shards to found or purchased porcelains dolls, animals, pipe
heads, trains, shoes, roosters or Virgin Mary statues and snakes, leaves,
sticks and other things that Lenzo makes himself.
The
son created the dad’s breakthrough in 2000 at age four, the year after Lenzo
had begun to make face jugs. At his father’s side, little Joe had already
created face jugs, which Lenzo still likes to hold up, marveling at the untrained
skill, looseness and good but asymmetrical features. Then the son started to
stick stuff into Lenzo’s jugs.
“One
day, I had a finished face jug on the table in my studio,” Lenzo says. “I had a
bowl of teeth, and Joe asked ‘can I put some teeth in the head?’ I said ‘okay’.
And off he goes.
‘Can
I stick one in the eye?’
‘In
the nose?’
That
piece I kind of looked at as Joe having fun. I put it on the shelf, and it
gathered dust for several months. Then I looked at it again and liked it. I put
it in the kiln, and it came out so fantastic. So I wanted Joe to do some more,
and he was so thrilled.”
The
son went to work, also with brushes and different colored slip that he would
mix. “It turned all black,” Lenzo says. “That was one of his specialties,
turning them black.” The son wanted to put a snake on the jug but didn’t like
the one he had made, so Lenzo made him some snakes. “He wanted leaves and
sticks, but real ones can’t work,” Lenzo says, “so I made him some of porcelain
and pre-fired them so that they wouldn’t break.”
The
next request was shoes. “I saw some in an antique store,” Lenzo says. “That
started me buying stuff from thrift stores and such.” His son’s invention of
putting a doll head in the eye especially excited Lenzo, and he would do so
many times himself. “Then he wanted to put Pokémon on it, so he just stuck some
shards in it and said it was Pokémon. And we named one Pokémon.”
Lenzo
would keep finished clay heads under plastic for when his son was ready to go.
Sometimes Joe would do one, other times three or so in a single sitting. He
would work with both hands at times. “There was never any hesitation,” Lenzo
says. “He just attacked it. He was so focused. Then one day he said he was
done. He didn’t want to do it anymore. And he didn’t.”
The
son would continue to tag along with his dad in the studio, the middle school
classroom where Lenzo taught or later after school at Southern Pottery, the
ceramics gallery and studio that Lenzo owned at the time. Like his sister, Roxanne,
he would create his own face jugs at times. Some sold alongside his dad’s for
hundreds of dollars to serious collectors.
“I
thought it was crazy when one of my pieces sold for more than $100,” says
Scotchie-Lenzo, now 19. Some went for $300 or $400. One ended up in the South
Carolina State Museum; a father-and-son co-production is in the Smithsonian. But
three years ago, the son stopped altogether.
“I
don’t know why,” Scotchie-Lenzo says. “It wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.
I had fun as a kid sticking stuff in faces, but later it became more like work.
Doing the whole thing – it took a lot of time.” Increased skill levels also increased
expectations, making the process harder. He has less time now, he says, and isn’t
around his dad and the studio as much.
“I
never really wanted to become an artist. Both my parents were. My whole youth
was spent around artwork, and I’ve seen so much. I love it, but I’ve been
around it all my life. I am not put off, but it was hard to see myself do that
also. I can do something else that I am not familiar with.”
“But
I like the idea of this exhibition. Seeing these pieces again brings back
memories of working in the studio. I like these pieces because they are so
random. It makes me want to go back and see what I can do now.”
“The
technique,” as Lenzo calls it, that Scotchie-Lenzo had invented out of the blue
as a four year old changed his father’s perspective. “Sticking fired clay into
wet clay was not done and is still not done,” Lenzo says. “When it didn’t crack
during firing, I was really surprised.”
The
ruthlessness with which Scotchie-Lenzo attacked nice faces that Lenzo had
labored over showed an attitude the latter didn’t have then. “I was never able
to do that. Those faces were precious. Sometimes I would distort a face or only
work around it but not destroy it. What Joe did almost seemed a sign of
disrespect for what I had done. It didn’t bother me, but it shocked me at
first. A couple of them, you didn’t even know they were a face. But I really
like the idea of sticking these things in the heads and became more deliberate
about what I would stick in there.”
Attaching
objects to clay faces and figures gave Lenzo a new vehicle for telling stories
when he could no longer do so by putting objects in finely crafted wooden alter
pieces. In the 1990s, brain damage from a bicycle accident in his youth had
caught up with him, and he increasingly suffered from seizures. Working with a
table saw and other power tools to create the altars was an accident waiting to
happen. As a result, Lenzo had switched to clay exclusively, making Southern-style
face jugs.
“To
me it was like telling stories,” Lenzo says about his new direction. “Stories
on the outside while the head was empty, which was a good metaphor for what I
was going through. All these drugs, the bad reactions to them, my memory
getting worse – having those heads empty seemed apt.”
“It
was a transitional time for me,” Lenzo says. “My seizures went from once every
six months to every week or ten days. Everything stopped: Teaching, working
with power tools, walking by myself. Life got squished. I wasn’t able to
achieve much. When I started working with Joe on the face jugs, I started
working more in clay.”
Both
father-and-son co-productions and Lenzo’s solo work in the new vein got noted,
earning Lenzo representation at SOFA New York and Chicago, solo exhibitions in
prominent galleries in Atlanta and Massachusetts and a growing reputation.
Lenzo loved making traditional face jugs but worried about abandoning the fine
art world from which he came. The new work bridged the gap. “Working with Joe
gave me a direction to go in when I didn’t know where to go. I wouldn’t say Joe
made me famous, but he made me sane.”
Wim
Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery
May 2015
Peter Lenzo & Joe
Scotchie-Lenzo
Columbia,
S.C., resident Peter Lenzo (b. 1955) is a widely recognized ceramic sculptor
with a national profile. The New York City native, who grew up in Detroit, was
selected for the 1995 and 1998 South Carolina
Triennial exhibitions at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia; the
2011 exhibition Triennial Revisited
and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial
2011 and 2013, all at 701 Center
for Contemporary Art in Columbia; and Thresholds,
a 2003 exhibition of Southeastern art dealing with religion and spirituality
that traveled extensively throughout the Southeast.
Lenzo’s
work is in several museum collections, including at the South Carolina State
Museum, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian
Museum in Washington, D.C. His solo exhibitions include those at the
Spartanburg (S.C.) Museum of Art, the European Ceramic Work Center in Den
Bosch, The Netherlands, Great American Gallery in Atlanta and Ferrin Contemporary
gallery in Massachusetts.
Lenzo
and his work have been featured in numerous books, exhibition catalogues and
articles about ceramic sculpture and Southern art. They include the Threshold catalogue, 500 Figures In Clay (2005), Robert
Hunter’s Ceramics in America (2006)
and Poetic Expressions of Mortality:
Figurative Ceramics From the Porter–Price Collection (2006). He holds an
MFA from Wayne State University in Detroit and used to teach at the University of South Carolina,
Columbia.
Joe
Scotchie-Lenzo (b. 1996) is Peter Lenzo’s son. He has been making and selling
ceramic sculptures off and on since he was four years old, although he hasn’t
produced any in three years. One co-production with his dad is in the
collection of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. One of his individual works is
in the South Carolina State Museum collection. Scotchie-Lenzo is a native and
resident of Columbia, where he is a business major with an interest in retail
and clothing at the University of South Carolina.
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