23-2019 – Lisa Reinertson – Inspirations from the Italian Renaissance and Beyond

In this workshop Lisa Reinertson will guide students in an exploration of figurative ceramic sculpture inspired both by working from life, and by the great figurative sculptures of the Italian Renaissance.
To get the inspirational juices going, we will begin the week with a visit to Florence and the Bargello Museum to see the amazing sculptures of the Italian Renaissance including works by Donatello, Michelangelo, and Della Robbia.
On return to the studio, we spend our first five mornings working with a live model, doing figure studies in bas-relief, and small 3-D figure studies. In the afternoons, we will each work on a mid-size hollow built sculpture inspired by the artwork seen in Florence. This can either be a 3-D wall piece like the Della Robbias, or a sculpture in the round.
We will do warm-up sketches with the model and sketches to develop your concept for your final sculpture. Lisa will work along with the students providing many opportunities for demonstrations of her sculpting techniques. Lisa will also show slides, and provide one-on-one feedback on construction, composition, and conceptual issues.
While your sculptures are being fired we will return to Florence to visit the Academia to see Michelangelo’s David and his powerful “Slave” sculptures.

Lisa Reinertson is a California artist known for her life -size figurative ceramic sculptures and her large-scale public sculptures cast in bronze.
Reinertson’s work has an underlying humanism that can be seen in her ceramic figures with animals that address environmental concerns, to her public commissions of historic leaders of Peace. Her public sculptures of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez blend bas-relief into three-dimensional sculptural forms that create an historic and powerfully moving narrative. Her work combines a realism rooted in figurative art traditions, with a contemporary expression of social, political and psychological content.
Reinertson completed her MFA at UC Davis in 1984, studying with Robert Arneson, and Manuel Neri. She has taught figurative ceramic sculpture at several universities and colleges in California, and is current faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her ceramic work has been in exhibitions and museums nationally and internationally, and is in several public and private collections including the Crocker Art Museum, the ASU Art Museum and the Mint Museum. Reinertson has completed over 20 public commissions in bronze. Recent exhibitions include her one-person show, “Edge of Extinction” at the Pence Gallery in Davis, and a three-person retrospective, “Large As Life” at the American Museum of Ceramic Art.
www.lisareinertson.com