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DRIED PEYOTE AND 7-UP: The Work and Vision of Michael Frimkess
$100.00
Member Price$90.00
“It happened so fast, but I have to describe it slowly. It was something I saw with my inner eye.”
For Michael Frimkess, the vision arrived in a shape slowly emerging from a mound of clay. There was the spin of the central axis, the sacred geometric alchemy of wet sand circling upon the wheel. “It was a narrow cylinder. And from the cylinder, it blossomed out, leaving a funnel lip. It was a beautiful shape. And there was no one throwing it - it was throwing itself. I was seeing this all clearly, and I wasn't a potter. I had never thrown a pot.”Instead, Michael Frimkess played saxophone, a prodigy just out of high school with a host of Boyle Heights and South LA jazz clubs already under his belt. He worshipped at the altar of Charlie Parker, and the question he asked on his first peyote journey pertained to his muse and master—“How could I play like Charlie?”
Frimkess was then barely out of his teenage years, the peyote a gift from a fellow musician. This was on the cusp of the West Coast Beatnik scene, art and exploration, poetry, and jazz blooming out of the still raw wounds of the war. Frimkess was at the heart of it, a child of an era of Angeleos, growing up on the far east side of the city, where diversity was the norm, Chicano, Japanese, Jewish – a family of artists who encouraged his creative experimentation. He painted, sculpted, and had proven his prowess on the saxophone. “But the vision wasn't playing the saxophone. The vision was a pot being thrown on the wheel. So, the next day, I dropped everything and enrolled in art school to learn how to become a potter.”
Frimkess became a student of Peter Voulkos, one of the most prominent potters in the emerging California Clay Movement. Already well-versed in jazz's underlying mathematics, Frimkess began experimenting on the wheel with classic forms, mimicking the shapes of ancient Greek pottery pieces and recontextualizing them and covering surfaces with vivid cartoon Pop Art imagery – bebop cisterns featuring hand-drawn figures of Mr. Magoo and Dick Tracy, comic strip icons immortalized in brightly colored glaze. Frimkess flourished, slowly defining his unique process on the wheel, experimenting with firing techniques and coloring – borrowing his forms from antiquity - Zuni pots, Chinese spice jars, Mediterranean wine, and olive oil containers – and transforming these inherently familiar shapes with wild 20th-century cultural narratives.
The stories Frimkess tells through his pots derive from his narrative - his childhood and youth in Los Angeles, his travels through Italy and Europe, and his early days as a musical prodigy. Satire and sly humor are balanced by a joy evident in the making of the work, by long nights fueled by caffeine and cannabis, and the vinyl scratch wail of Charlie Parker.
In Frimkess’ work, massive Greek urns emerge intact from the kiln, only to be ornamented by a heady and wonderfully chaotic mix of cartoon figures and sketches. Betty Boop or Donald Duck are glimpses dancing across the vast belly of clay’s surface, or even sometimes, Frimkess himself, bearded and smiling. Yet in all his pieces, freedom and notion is underscored by spectacular technique, precision, and storytelling imbued with a love of history and Frimkess’ deep and enduring affinity and reverence for jazz.
The saxophone is present in his work, and the music continually informs his time at the wheel and vice versa. “I couldn't really keep away from music. I always had to go back to the saxophone. I never did learn to play like Charlie Parker, but I did, finally learn to play like Michael Frimkess.”
Limited edition of 250
- Paperback
- 9 x 6 inches