man+from+his+youth...,+The

Date: 1980
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/1980/1980.98_2a.jpg&max=460 width="245" height="323" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=7712"]] || Title: **The man from his youth, now he is old, sitting in the evening, drinking coffee, and looking again through yellow light bulb light at the paper calendar picture hanging on the kitchen wall. He knows why he looks and what he sees but he can't say because the picture is a secret he keeps from his words.**

Artist: **Jack Earl** Born: Uniopolis, Ohio 1934

Medium: painted and glazed porcelain Dimensions: 11 3/4 x 10 in. (29.8 x 25.4 cm) diam. Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase

Accession: 1980.98 ||
 * About the Artwork: **

“Jack Earl makes two kinds of small-scale porcelain sculpture. The fist type is realistic and humorous; the other, fantastic and enigmatic. His realistic pieces concern ordinary people in everyday settings and situations.” – [Art in America, Nov/Dec 1978]
 * About the Artist: **

“Earl presents simple people doing ordinary things, namely the stuff of life of mainstream Middle America. . . (These are). . . private people, who tell their innermost thoughts only to their intimate familiars, particularly their dogs.” – [Geraldine Wonjno Kiefer, 1982]

“I like things that when you look at them you know they were made by people, living somewhere in some kind of environment and having personal thoughts, personal lives, families, maybe friends.” – Jack Earl

Jack Earl attended Bluffton College and Ohio State University during the 1950s and 1960s, where he worked on producing Japanese-inspired pottery. His style changed drastically after he saw European porcelain figures in the 1970s. At this point he stopped making functional pottery and began to create ceramic sculptures portraying scenes of Midwestern life. Earl has drawn upon his experiences of living in Ohio as inspiration for the imagery in his work, to which he commonly assigns long descriptive titles.

Jack Earl's small, off-beat, lovingly detailed ceramic narratives center on a hapless Everyman named Bill, a rubbery-limbed bumpkin in blue jeans, a red work shirt and a red billed cap. Bill is a down-to-earth fellow in a terrestrial world - a rural denizen of his creator's home state of Ohio, one imagines - but his adventures tend to the surreal.

In this, Mr. Earl's sixth New York solo show since 1972, the most impressive piece combines several scenes into one funny, in-the-round retelling of the Faust myth. Bill takes a stray dog into his extravagantly slovenly home (note the socks drying on the furnace in the living room), whereupon the dog turns into a miniature Bill who declares himself to be Mephistopheles and asks to stay; Bill opens the screen door and kicks him out. (The story is also narrated in words inscribed on a faux-carved stone pedestal that supports the section of earth on which Bill's house is built.)

Looking through peek-hole. Crouching figure of a farmer peers through knothole on side of a tree and envisions idyllic landscape. Symbolizes lost innocence of youth. Painted porcelain sculpture narrating a surrealistic fantasy. - [Source: Notes from Curator-led Walk-Throughs in the Gallery and various Catalogs]
 * Additional Information: **

Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page
 * Links: **