Tall's early childhood was spent emersed in Disney and cartoon images, as her parents were employed by Disney World. She remembers talking to her friends on a Mickey Mouse telephone, and getting her mail out of an Elmer McFudd mailbox. As they lived in Florida, the front of her house was painted with a four foot tall set of flamingos taken from a set of playing cards.
Fantasy, and furniture that moved and animals that talked, became a natural part of Tall's environment. As she began to travel, visting art galleries and museums, and to study art history in college for completion of her Master's Degree in Art, she was able to merge this early carnivalesqe imagery with increasingly more sophisticated techniques, and incorporate references to pop culture and surrealism.
Influenced also by the writers Joseph Campbell, author of The Power of Myth, and Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, Tall began in the early 90's to create sculpture driven by her own personal mythology.
As she worked through these metaphors, she discovered a soft responsive clay that encouraged repetitive shingle like finger marks. This unique texture served to unite her body of work and enabled her to simplify her sculpture to include only the most important elements.
Tall is often asked "How long does it take to make a sculpture?" Because of the softness of the clay, only 5" can be built in a day. All the sculptures start at the bottom, working in an spiral coil-pinch technique until the need for a separate layer is reached. At this time, she creates a lego-like connector on the inside of the piece so it can go apart and come back together. After the building is complete, the sculpture must be dried, coated with powdered copper and terra sigillata, and fired 14 hours in a kiln to 1600 degress. Sometimes additional firings are needed, so the whole process can take from 6 weeks to 3 months.
The resultant surfaces resemble a three dimensional, richly textured abstract painting. The colors are subtle, reminiscent of lichen covered stone and ancient tapestries. Tall wants the sculpture to have a feeling of 'history', almost as though they were created years ago by an unknown civilization.
In 2005, Tall began a series of paintings which brought to life her three dimensional characters by placing them together in an environment. Using a layering technique on canvas, she begins with images of her sculptural work, pop images from magazines, and textures and prints from old books. She continues to build up the surface with layers of acrylic paint, wax pastels, oil paint and oil crayon. A final glaze its applied to unify and protect the surface.
Copyright 1995-2009 Cheryl Tall Art Studio
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Cheryl Tall Art Studio, 114 N. Coast Hwy. 101, Ste. 2, Leucadia, CA 92024, 760-479-0399