In recent years Sean Sexton, a third-generation cattle rancher who has made a name for himself as a painter, printmaker and poet, has added “sculptor” to his creative resume.
Beginning Jan. 8, an exhibition that combines examples of his latest work in ceramic sculpture with his Florida landscape paintings and an etching or two, will be on display at Vero’s Center for Spiritual Care.
The name of the exhibition, “As Above, So Below,” comes from hermeticism, an ancient belief system that embraced religion, philosophy, geometry and alchemy. It strove to find equivalents between the material and spiritual; between the particular and the general; between humanity and a transcendent universe. The teaching to which the show’s title refers holds that through studying one’s own position in God’s creation, the seeker of wisdom can find God within himself.
Sexton says that for him, the phrase is “about tying earthly things to heavenly things. I was trying to do this particularly in the ceramics. I was setting what I was doing in paint, in stone.”
As an artist, Sexton has devoted his career to examining his relationship to the world in pencil on paper and paint on canvas. He spent his childhood on Treasure Hammock Ranch, the cattle operation that his father, Ralph Sexton, worked before him and that his grandfather, Vero pioneer and entrepreneur Waldo Sexton, founded. Every aspect of the microcosm that is life on a Florida cattle ranch has been recorded by Sean Sexton: its land, its animals (both domesticated and wild), its seasons, and the cycle of birth, death and decay that is farming’s imperative.
These days, Sexton is engaged in glazing a large, egg-shaped clay vessel modeled on a Han dynasty “cocoon vase” that he has admired on repeat visits to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. Sexton’s vase bears two bas-relief panoramas based on the flora and fauna he has seen on the ranch. He hopes to make it a centerpiece of the show, if it comes through the firing in one piece.
“I was trying to put everything in it,” he says of the myriad life forms with which the vase is decorated.
On one side of the vase feral hogs forage in a pasture dotted with sabal palms and slash pines; the view is framed at right by a close-up tangle of thistle. The other side of the vase features a brahma cow licking her newborn calf as a family of sandhill cranes looks on; a coral snake underscores the scene with an elegant arabesque. One end of the vase bears a medallion-like image of a calf in utero; the other exhibits a three-dimensional bird, a gnatcatcher, on her nest.
“I think these elements convey a lot of those things that are particular to here,” says Sexton.
He then refines his assertion.
“They may not be particular to only here, but they certainly do the job of giving you a sense of where I’ve spent my whole life, or things I’ve known about my whole life.”
And while Sexton readily admits that the vase tells a detailed story about a beloved place, he says he is interested in capturing “something beyond the narrative.”
Something, he insists, “that is at the bones of the whole place.”
In fact, the hardness and resistance to illusionistic representation of ceramics provides a concrete counterpoint to Sexton’s light-filled, oil on canvas landscapes.
“I feel more at liberty to go to certain subjects in this medium that I wouldn’t go to in painting. I can’t even explain that. I just wouldn’t do a painting like the one on that box there,” he says, indicating a rectangular ceramic box whose decoration places a skyward-soaring swallowtail kite in proximity to a cicada resting on a nearby tree trunk.
“That’s an illustration in a certain way. It doesn’t interest me as a painter, but it interests me greatly as a ceramic artist,” Sexton says.
The same is true of a square box that depicts on its sides the different stages of a cow embryo in its mother’s womb. Near it, a cylindrical box’s lid is surmounted by the form of a newborn calf lying amid spiky tufts of grass. The box is supported on four bovine heads; its wraparound landscape, filled with white cattle and green scrub palmetto, abuts a shiny blue-glazed sky.
That one is based on another old Chinese form, a round jar whose lid is shaped like a small mountain.
Opening a book in which just such a pot is illustrated, Sexton exclaims, “The idea of putting a mountain on a pot! Isn’t that a terrific idea?”
Sexton developed his enthusiasm for clay about five years ago.
Back then he and his wife, artist Sharon Sexton, had seen their two children grow up and move out of the house, their daughter Julia to Portland and their son Michael to school in Gainesville. Bored with falling asleep in front of the TV each evening, they decided to attend a raku pottery class at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
A member of Tiger Lily Studios in downtown Vero, Sharon Sexton was already noted locally for her ceramic sculpture and tile murals. For her husband, however, clay offered brand-new possibilities for presenting the subjects previously drawn and painted.
“I made some things and fired them and really sort of delighted in the whole thing, the modelling,” Sexton says.
Although he eventually took several clay classes at the museum, sculpting rather than potting remained his focus; the cocoon pot and a couple of other vessel forms that he subsequently covered in bas relief were thrown for him by one of his wife’s Tiger Lily colleagues, Glenda Taylor.
“I don’t want to learn how to throw, I really don’t. Having Glenda do that lets me concentrate on something else,” says Sexton.
That “something else” being Sexton’s learning how to handle ceramic glazes as effectively as he does oil paint. In oil painting, the color you put on the canvas is the color you end up with, but pottery glazing is an indirect art. Glaze colors and textures as applied change dramatically in the kiln.
“The kiln – you abandon your things to the kiln, and you hope for the best. It’s a wonderful losing of control. Some people would say, it’s not wonderful at all, it’s terrible. You lose control, and nobody wants to lose control over anything, at least if they don’t have to,” Sexton says, adding that his work in clay has made him more accepting of the accidents that happen between his intentions for a piece, and the way it ultimately turns out. “That has changed to a large degree what I’ve wanted to do” in ceramics, he says. It has also changed how he thinks about painting.
“My God, I’ve killed myself to be faithful to what I see. That has all changed as a result of doing ceramics. I realize that I need to take greater imaginative steps in everything that I’m doing,” he says.
The reception for As Above, So Below is Jan. 8 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Spiritual Care, 1550 24th St. in Vero. The exhibition runs through Feb. 26.