Description
“Tan Cup”
Price includes shipping and handling.
Dimensions: 4.6 inches tall, 3 inches wide
Ronald Guy Dale was born in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. After graduation from high school and a turn in the US Navy he studied at the University of North Carolina at Asheville for two years (1973–75) before receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree from Goddard College (1977) and a master of fine arts degree in ceramics from Louisiana State University (1979). He taught at the University of Mississippi from 1980 until 2005, when he became a professor emeritus.
Dale was a favorite professor of numerous students and was named Teacher of the Year in 2002. He also taught ceramics at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in the summers of 1985 and 1995; at Cortona, Italy, in the summer of 1987; and at Blackhills Pottery in Elgin, Scotland, in the fall of 2000. He has lectured and conducted ceramics workshops throughout the South and received numerous awards, including a Southern Arts Federation Emerging Artist Award in 1985 and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts Award in 1992. His work is in numerous private and public collections and has been shown in twenty-five solo exhibitions and nearly one hundred group-invitational exhibitions throughout the nation.
Dale works in two modes, one making dinnerware, cups, pitchers, bowls, trays, and vases. Inspired by his teachers, Byron Temple and Cynthia Bringle, and by the work and words of potter Bernard Leach, Dale tries “to combine strong tradition with an awareness of contemporary meaning in developing, simple, straightforward forms. . . . The process is complete only when the pots are used.”
For his other mode Dale uses clay and wood to create multidimensional sculptures. “My sculptural work has evolved out of the traditional vocabulary of the vessel,” he explains. “Combined with architectural and furniture imagery, I am able to explore concepts of altered space and perspective, light and shadow, and the flattening of form while allowing for a more direct expression of ideas—ideas dealing with both social and personal issues.”
After reading The Good Life, Helen and Scott Nearings’s 1954 book on back-to-the-land self-sufficiency, Dale became determined to combine his living and working conditions. He designed and built the home in rural Lafayette County near Oxford where he and his wife reared their daughter and son. With the opening of Irondale Studio in 1996 on land next to his home, Dale realized his dream.
