Inez Storer & Gordon Bryan

March 15-April 20, 2025

Blunk Space is pleased to present Inez Storer & Gordon Bryan, an exhibition of new and historic paintings and works on paper by Storer and new ceramic vessels by Bryan. Five new collaborative ceramic works, fashioned by Bryan and painted by Storer, bring the two Point Reyes Station-based artists into direct conversation.

Inez Storer (b. 1933) has lived and worked in West Marin for over fifty years. She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (1981-1999), Sonoma State University (1976-1988), San Francisco State University (1970-1973), and the College of Marin (1968-1979), and has exhibited internationally. Storer brings a tongue-in-cheek tenderness to her works on paper and paintings, combining deft lines with collaged wordplay and sourced imagery. The exhibition presents a selection of never-before-exhibited early figure drawings, enigmatic interiors with jaunty green shoes, alongside a very early painting of a fantastical landscape exhibited at Mills College in 1972. Two new paintings on panel make reference to Matisse’s Mediterranean interiors, but with a personal narrative and wink of humor all her own.

Gordon Bryan (b. 1959) lives and works in Point Reyes Station. His coil-built ceramic works combine reverent references to the forms of antiquity and a playful, modern sensibility. After running a ceramic tile business for nearly forty years, Bryan now embraces the freedom and risk of handcrafting, manipulating glazes in an electric kiln just as JB Blunk did. A new series of soot black and ivory white standing vessels reference ancient Mediterranean aesthetics and also pay homage to Blunk's early ceramic works from Japan.

For their collaborative pieces, Bryan and Storer worked in succession, each ceding some portion of artist control to the other. Bryan would build the shaped vessel, and Inez would then paint with glazes he provided. He also provided her with a cheat sheet so she could understand the glazes, but, he said, “she didn’t look at it.” The resulting plates, tea set, and ceramic paintings have Bryan’s characteristic textured, encrusted forms and Storer’s buoyant, colorful imagery.

Inez Storer Artist Statement

Looking Backward and Looking Forward…As I dive into the past and look forward to the future, I can see that I do some “pirating” from previous work, which now freely floats into my present ideas. It is not so hard to do, but enough struggle to give it “credence,” confidence and creative motives. All to the good. Not racing around, just sort of a wallowing in what I know and experimenting with freedom with what I don’t know. A sort of ah, ha moment, pretty generous of the art gods! It comes with age, and criticism also comes with age but it does not matter so much. That is the gift of making art since the first memories of making sand “towers” at around the age of three! So there, all you old critics! All possibilities await in the dark…and how sweet that is for a long and fruitful art practice.

Glue, scraps, photos, letters, images of “Strange and Wonderful Things” await my tools and MORE glue and more search for more data to GRAB!  And finally, my old and often-used mantra was always tossed to so many of my wonderful students and those who filled my life anew.   If one line has stayed with me, it is… “The person who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot” – Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto.

Gordon Bryan Artist Statement

I like the basic, fundamental, historical, personal, dug from the ground, earth based, natural, spontaneous, simple, unlimited, utilitarian/functional, sensual nature of working with clay and creating vessels. Objects that are part of the past but also completely new to the world as in this never existed until now. 

I start with a lump of clay, it’s so primal and basic, the possibilities are unlimited. Sometimes I work from a drawing and sometimes I just start forming and go from there. Using the coil technique gives me the ability to create a wide variety of shapes. I find the intersection between functionality and art to be my passion. Taking something that is functional and turning it into a thing of beauty or interest is probably the origin of all the arts. In ceramics that challenge is still real and ongoing and is the basis for much of what I make.