Directory
Marla Sweitzer
Instructor
Fine, Performing and Communication Arts Division
Fine Art
Education
- BA Centre College
- MFA University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Courses taught at Fresno City College:
- Beginning Drawing
- Introduction to Craft Workshop
- Intermediate Craft Workshop
About
In her ceramic paintings Sweitzer explores how changing light interacts with color as it falls across a hand-built surface. Her visual language is rooted in an early engagement with landscape painting. Each ceramic painting acts as a walled form on which light illuminates the subtleties of color and surface — blurring the distinction between architecture and landscape. She pieces clay together, clump by clump, in a process of repetitive mark-making. As the clay dries, edges warp, forming irregular boundaries. She then applies oil paint to the ceramic surfaces, setting the forms aglow in undulating fields of matte pigment. Painted in daylight hours in layered compressions of time, each structure becomes a distillation of landscapes, evoking memories of color and qualities of light.
Recognitions, Awards & Achievements
Recent solo exhibitions include Warping the Distances, Art Space Gallery (Fresno), Sight Lines, Housewright Gallery (Seattle) and ground matter, Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture (Knoxville). Recent group exhibitions include Innocent Pleasures Suit Me, Warbling Collective (London) and Promises, Jason McCoy Gallery (NYC).
