Meet Craig Wisner | Artist/Educator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Craig Wisner and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Craig, what’s the most important lesson your business/career has taught you?
As a lifelong public educator, I’ve come to truly value the interconnectedness created through the school community. A few thousand students have come through the doors of my ceramics program at Culver City High School and it’s an honor to have played a small role in so many individual stories. While teaching is very much about giving, after decades in this career, I begin to wonder if all of my students have not given me more. There have been countless connections; laughs, tears, celebrating wins, and mourning losses in each other’s lives. I’m struck by the circular nature of it all, often wondering if it was I that was actually the student all along.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I want my work to evoke a sense of ritual and mystery, something ancient and archetypal that cannot quite be named and yet feels familiar. Technically, I strive to produce ceramic art that covers a spectrum of traditional building techniques, from coil-built, larger scale sculpture to throwing on the potter’s wheel. I’m inspired by tradition and enjoy making work that references and celebrates the long history of the medium of clay, often through using time-honored glazes or forms that hint at the classical. It’s very important that my work embodies an element of the natural world, pulling from a color and texture palette that celebrates the mountains and deserts that I call home. Skill comes from repetition and work should embody a sense of technical proficiency…but without losing the spontaneity of the handmade. I hope to strike a balance between the refined and the effortless.
Developing a voice as an artist almost seems to be an act of faith; I cannot say that I ever really knew where the path was leading. Looking back across the work I’ve made over a few decades, so much was experimental and pushing into very different directions, but as I get older and more mature as an artist, a common thread starts to emerge and I can see more clearly who I am. I believe the key is simply putting one’s head down and going to work, trusting that in the discipline of a practice a perspective will start to emerge.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
A day in the city would be in order, possibly a visit to LACMA. We’d definitely get lunch…an omelette on fried rice- at Kouraku in Little Tokyo. At some point there would certainly be mountains, deserts, and beaches involved; maybe climb a peak in the high country of Angeles National forest, visit a beach in northern Malibu, rock climbing in the Mojave Desert…People don’t think of Los Angeles as an outdoor paradise but we are in striking distance of many very spectacular wilderness areas.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’ve had a lot of great mentors and people in my life, but my shoutout has to go first and foremost to my wife and lifelong partner, Lusi. An artist in her own right, she’s been through this entire journey with me and I owe much to her support. Whenever I was in doubt, she would always say “go”.

I also have to mention two of my earliest ceramics professors, Philip Cornelius and Jim Gonzalez. Both of them are responsible for igniting the ceramic spark that’s been with me for decades.

Website: https://www.craigwisner.art

Instagram: @sweepingthegarden