Website URL and other social media platforms:

www.linnisblanton.com

IG:  blantonspottery

Bio:

My name is Linnis Blanton and I am an adjunct instructor of art at Lamar University. This is my twentieth year at Lamar and prior I taught thirty years with Port Arthur ISD. I graduated from Lamar with a Bachelor of Science Art Ed. in 1972 and a Bachelor Fine Art in 1976. I was greatly influenced by my professors James Watkins and Sara Waters at Texas Tech University. Another major influence was travels through Chaco Cayon in New Mexico and Sedona, Arizona, and Cliff Dwellings in Mesa Verde, Colorado, while investigating my Native American heritage.

I studied and taught meditation which has added an important spiritual level to my work, allowing it to evolve slowly from within. My holistic journey also incorporates something I learned from Robert Rauschenberg “If you do not know where you're going with a piece you might end up in a place that you have never been.” Not knowing is a good place to be, it allows me to give the piece what it needs instead of what I need.

Artist Statement:

The plasticity and sensuousness of the clay is the reason I love to make vessels. The clay is constantly recording my touch and thoughts as I express my creativity. A major influence on my work was a trip to New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona to visit sacred sights of the Anastazi Indians. My vessels suggest the natural phenomena of the canyon walls that are transformed from my imagination to the pots surface.  As I work on the vessels that represent the canyon walls, they begin to change into figures. The figures seem to appear as spirits of ancestors. I alter, modify, push, and pull the surface of the clay in an attempt to express a connection of the past and present.