David Shaner's illustrious career as a sculptor and a potter spanned more than four decades. Trained in the late 1950's at Alfred University School of Ceramics, Shaner became the director of the influential Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana. After leaving Helena, Shaner became a nationally acclaimed studio potter and sculptor, working out of his home and studio in Bigfork, Montana. Through an unwavering devotion to his work, he attained that often elusive goal of bridging the gap between art and life to which so many artists aspire. His ceramic vessels and sculpture reflect the beauty of the western landscape and the natural environment. His innovations and success with refined organic forms and the wood firing process made him a leader in ceramics and sought after by museums and private collectors alike.
Shaner’s use of earthenware examines material origin, the artist meditating and focusing on the geological foundations under which the substance exists, so as to recall nature in each of his non-representative sculptural acts. The “Hanging Landscape” is a series of simple spheroid clay forms, each segment quietly and elegantly resolved then strung up and suspended sequentially. However, through acts of reference — as well as delicate use of relationship in terms of colours and textures found in startling and intelligently utilised natural processes — a notion of the land is poetically built almost like the sedimentary layers of earth itself. Hanging landscape, Big Fork, MT, 1994 Glazed and incised stoneware, steel cable Chop mark to several pieces 65" x 5 1/2" Provenance: Purchased from the artist.