uring a career, which has spanned over 25 years, Richard Deutsch has developed from making small-scale experimentations with clay to designing and creating public environments that include monumental 30-foot outdoor sculptures.

Richard Deutsch was born in Los Angeles in 1953. He trained as a ceramist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and began exhibiting his work in the late 70’s. Initially inspired by traditional Japanese Bizan ceramics Deutsch used his sculptural understanding of gravity, space and monumental size to push the constraints of his materials until he eventually developed in the direction of creating public environments.

Richard Deutsch Transom 2001 Composite materials 12 x 50 x 18 feet

Richard Deutsch is the recipient of numerous awards including a Visiting Artist’s fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and a Visual Artist’s grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Deutsch’s sculpture is in the permanent collection of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California; the Oakland Museum of California, in Oakland, California and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Richard Deutsch lives and works in Davenport, California.

Richard Deutsch Seven Stones 1999 Granite 20 x 36 x 17 feet Collection of Anita and Ronald Wornick, St. Helena, California

Richard Deutsch: Well, yes and no. They wanted me to take on something and do it well. They encouraged me to do whatever that was. I just happened to be very artistic and that was where I developed my passion, so they recognized that. When I was in high school I did art lessons after school: painting, drawing and ceramics. So they encouraged me but they would have encouraged me in any field.

Art Interview: Weren’t they afraid that if you became an artist you would end up homeless and starving?

Richard Deutsch Motion 1989 Wall relief, mixed media 10 x 10 x 3 ft Port of Oakland, Oakland, California

I have had to reflect on my parents’ style of raising me. I was very fortunate to grow up in the time that I did. Getting back to my father’s form of parental guidance, he was tough and the encouragement that he gave me was “Look, if you want to do this, then you’d better do it and do it well, because there is no bottom that is going to hold you up. You really need to make it work for yourself or do something else.”

Now I am a parent myself and my wife and I have paid for piano lessons, art classes and theater camps for my children since they were 5 years old. Our kids have been so infused with the arts it’s not even funny. When my daughter was in the process of looking for universities she wanted an arts-oriented college. Now that my children are highly creative people and entering into the real world, I can’t just say, “Oh, I was just kidding about that, we really want you to be a banker”.

Richard Deutsch Negative Cone 2004 Granite 17 x 20 x 20 inches

Richard Deutsch: I went to the University of California in Santa Cruz and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1976. It was not a tremendous education, but it was good enough for me. I was in an arts program at the university and I took it very seriously. I worked 16 hours a day and I was very much on a rampage developing myself as an artist. I had spent my junior high and high school years making art; painting and drawing and printmaking, ceramics and going every which way. When I got into college I focused a lot more intensely. When I graduated from college, I was in the same boat as some of my other art friends in terms of ‘what do I do now’ so we decided to rent a warehouse and all work together. Everyone was doing different things but we all stuck together and that’s when I started making art for sale and trying to see what it might be like to make it work.

Richard Deutsch Untitled 1984 Woodfired Clay Construction

Art Interview: What experiences did you have while you were looking for your first gallery?

Richard Deutsch: I had experiences that were both good and also the opposite. Certainly you go and get slapped in the face a bunch. But one of the things that I realized was that it wasn’t a requirement that everyone like my work. I learned that it wasn’t important that I fit in everywhere. For instance, when I went to Seattle I thought all I really needed was one gallery to think my work was worthwhile and then I would have a show and start getting exposure in different parts of the country. I set the goal for myself to find a gallery and succeeded.

Richard Deutsch Relaxed Curves 2001 Granite 50 x 96 x 72 inches Courtesy of Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Richard Deutsch: It took me a couple of years. We had that warehouse in Santa Cruz, which is a little bit of a tourist town, so we had people coming through. We had our work displayed and there were people from Seattle and Oakland that stopped in and said, “Hey you’re doing some interesting work maybe you would like to show in our town”. There was a collector from Seattle that took me around and introduced me to the different galleries there. So, that was really my first major show. At the time the chief curator from the Seattle Art Museum came to see the show. Once you start exposing yourself collectors introduce you to other collectors and museums directors introduce you so things start to happen. I showed in Los Angeles and San Francisco and mainly concentrated on the West Coast. I did try the East Coast but didn’t get any interest there.

Art Interview: Why do you think your work was more accepted on the West Coast? Was it because of the type of work you were doing, or the fact that you were living on the West Coast?

Richard Deutsch: I think there were a number of reasons that I was more accepted on the West Coast. As a young artist you’re a dime a dozen. You come out of school with all this enthusiasm and an “I’m going to conquer the world” attitude. At that point you’re still very self-absorbed. I think there are a whole lot of artists in their twenties that haven’t stepped on the rake yet. They haven’t been discouraged by how difficult it is to be an artist, so there is an optimism that carries young artists into the world.

Robert Arneson (1930-1992) Desolatus 1984 Clay and enamel 210 x 102 Denver Art Museum

Art Interview: How long was it before you became self-sufficient with your work?

Richard Deutsch: I think was very up and down. I did many shows up until 1984 and then I was showing in Seattle, in the Detroit and Chicago areas, but no one was buying my work. My work was getting larger and larger and I had gotten to a point where I needed to reevaluate what I was doing. I experimented a lot and my work had developed further and further, but that didn’t translate into anyone buying it. The work had become more challenging and had also become more expensive: instead of its being 400 dollars it was more like 1200 dollars and this was in 1983 and 1984. It just wasn’t selling. So I decided I might as well move way forward, rather than backward. I started developing work that was more toward my dream. I took a huge step forward. That’s when I really started to work with hard, large materials. I was experimenting with cements and concrete and stone and combinations of all of those.

Art Interview: How were you supporting yourself through all of this? Did you have a part-time job?

Richard Deutsch: I’ve always been self-sufficient. For instance, when I made art with concrete I also did cement work and when I bought a floor grinder for my art I also made some money grinding and polishing floors. I just realized that there weren’t many people around who could do it and the people that could charge a lot of money. I’ve done a lot of different things. I was taking on small commissions like making dinnerware. I had a full ceramic studio and I had the technical skill and ability to make anything. I created a series of lighting units, a series of vessels and other functional ware. But I would do that almost left-handed because it was never where my focus was. I was just knocking it out to pay the monthly rent so I could get on with my real ambition.

In 1987 I applied for a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and I got a fellowship for a visiting artist’s residency. This was the first time I was in Italy and I was exposed to so many different things, technically, visually and aesthetically that that year was a real turning point for me.

Manuel Neri Untitled 1991 Bronze with oil base enamel 65 x 18 x 15 ¼ inches Denver Art Museum

Art Interview: What kind of work did you show him?

Richard Deutsch: I mainly showed him my ceramic work but I had also just had a solo show in San Francisco of all the concrete and terrazzo work that I was doing and I think that that was what he responded to. That was also the work that I focused on while I was there. It was actually perfect because the “restoration series” I was doing was about stone and columns that had been broken apart and reassembled with parts missing. It was a lot like the columns of Pompeii, which had been sort of resurrected with concrete filling in the gaps. I had a direct interest in being in and around Rome. It was strongly present in the work that I had spent developing during those 2 years.

Richard Deutsch in Carrara, Italy 1988

Art Interview: Was that something that you had proposed or did someone approach you because they had heard of your work?

Richard Deutsch Voyage 1991 Wall relief, World War 2 ship propellers, bronze 13 x 32 x 4 feet West Garden, IIII Broadway Building City Center, Oakland, California

Richard Deutsch: Yes, it was. What really helped was how naive I was at the time. I was just very honest about that. You know, I was working with this design team, the developer, the architect, the landscape architect and we would move this building around like it was a chess piece. I posed questions that came from an artist’s point of view and they would end up doing very different things because of the issues that I brought up. For example, they wanted to have an elevator coming from the garage and an air vent and I ask why don’t we put a curved wall here? We can use it as an art feature. I was constantly saying why don’t we do this and why don’t we do that. They would look at me and say, “Well, how would you do it? We have the bones of the Plaza, let’s make it work in a dramatic way.” So I would come up with these ideas that on one level were impossible because of the cost, but on another level were what they really wanted. In the end we found ways to work within our budget.

Richard Deutsch Two massive bronze propellers were donated by the U.S Merchant Marine for the project Voyage

Art Interview: Did you have to rent space to work on the project or was space provided for you?

Richard Deutsch Transporting two massive bronze propellers donated by the U.S Merchant Marine for the project Voyage

Richard Deutsch Restoration 1989 Marble and terrazo 68 x 23 x 8 inches Collection of Shari and Garin Staglin, Rutherford, California

Richard Deutsch: Well, the transition really came in 1984 when I started asking myself who am I, what do I want to say, where do I want to go and what is my dream. At the time the ceramic work I did was heavily influenced by the history of Japanese ceramics and I developed firing styles that were a combination of using Anagama kilns and using the firing techniques of the American Indians. I was doing a lot of wood and natural firings that were both low fire and high fire. I began to feel that it would be more fitting for a fifth or sixth generation Japanese ceramist to be doing work like this than me. That’s when my desire became focused towards developing larger works that were more in keeping with the traditions that developed in the United Sates such as minimalism and expressionism. So, I decided to carry on discovering in that mode, rather than being so interested in firing techniques. That’s when I made that shift. My work in ceramics had become so large that I was really facing some technical difficulties. Moving these pieces around caused breakage and warping. It was really frustrating. We used to joke that it was a good thing the city dump was between my studio and my kiln. On the way from the kiln we can just dump it off. I was at a point where I was shifting inside and looking more towards a lifetime of art making. What I was fascinated by in college was something I had played out and I needed to be more inclusive of a personal aesthetic, not that I hadn’t touched on it, some of my ceramic work was very much an exploration of my own aesthetic but still only in a limited way.

Art Interview: Do you find some of the work you are doing now reflective of your earlier ceramics work?

Richard Deutsch 2005 Chinese Granite Chevy Chase City Center, Washington D.C.

There are two plazas that I designed for the Chevy Chase City Center in the Washington DC area. We had just installed a piece and upon looking at that when it was done it was reminiscent of some of my earlier ceramic forms; although not consciously so. The plaza is still not finished. We just installed the fountain and sculpture and it’s a 10,000 sq. feet plaza and now we are doing another one that we well begin in February, which has 5 large stone sculptures. I’m doing all the benches and an 85 feet curved granite wall. That’s the main project right now. Earlier this year we completed a memorial site for a Jewish congregation.

Art Interview: On average, how many projects do you work on in a year?

Richard Deutsch: Well, usually the projects last a lot longer than a year and I am generally working on 2 or 3 projects that are at all different stages. I mean, I might be close to installing one and working on the design of another. It all sort of depends on what’s going on.

Art Interview: Do you have a system that you use in order to propose your work and to actualize it?

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This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Richard Deutsch on October 10, 2005. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and Davenport, California, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.