Nina de Creeft Ward

 

Always fascinated by animals, Nina de Creeft Ward began to draw them seriously from life when she was at Scripps College (BA ’56) going to the San Diego Zoo and the County Fair, and drawing goats, horses, cats and dogs at home in Ojai. With great teachers, she had been carving stone and wood, and making clay animals with Albert Stewart and Betty Davenport Ford. At the Claremont Graduate School (MFA ’64) taking ceramics from Paul Soldner, she began Raku firing. She has worked in: soft sculpture, bronze, and cast paper, as well as clay. She has shown work in California, the Philippines, the Midwest, and on the East Coast.

In the late seventies, she began a series of large clay antelope. After a low temperature firing with a little glaze, they were sawdust-smoked. She liked the accidental quality of the smoke colors, similar to Raku, and wanted to keep the natural grace of living animals, seeing the pieces as stories of individuals, with a feeling of fragility. These are fragments which echo the limited place wild animals have left in our world today. Since moving back to Santa Barbara in 2001, she has continued the theme of extinct or threatened animals, working with various surfaces, having some work wood-fired, and some low salt-fired as well as Raku. The wall pieces in this exhibition are low salt-fired.

 

 

All images and text Copyright © 2011 by Nina De Creeft Ward