| Victor Spinski | ||
| Birth Date: October 10, 1940 |
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| Death Date: January 21, 2013 Artist Gallery |
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| Look once, look twice – all of what you see with this piece is ceramic.
Victor Spinski, born in Newton, Kansas, in 1940 has become a consummate master of visual illusions; trompe l’oiel – to fool the eye. While studying for his Masters at University of Indiana in 1968, Spinski learned the technique of low firing from a ceramic engineer Karl Martz, which gave Spinski freedom to develop in his own way. Although Spinski became accomplished in pottery; he recalled, "my soul was in sculpture."
While he focused on ceramics, he also took courses in jewelry making and photography. From jewelry he learned an exacting discipline and precise fabrication, but he found that, as a medium, clay was more challenging. He could continually reshape metal, but with clay, he had only once chance to get the form right. From photography, which he studied with philosopher and photographer Henry Holmes Smith, he learned how color could have different zones of intensity.
Spinski identifies with the trompe l’oeil tradition of still-life painting, especially the work of Michael William Harnett. He also admired surrealism, in particular the works of Salvador Dali and René Magritte. Unlike these painters, however, Spinski thinks of creating arrangements of objects in three dimension.
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