Our first artist featured in our inaugural Blog Interviews with Artists series is St. Petersburg sculptor Beate Marston. I asked Beate to provide a little information about herself before the interview. Full disclosure, Beate and I have been good friends for several years, and despite her extreme modesty, she is one of the best sculptors in the country. Check out her work at www.beatetude.com.

Beate’s Bio (in her own words):

I currently live in St.Petersburg, FL in the US, and have lived here for over 40 years. I spent my childhood in Portugal, Germany and India. The cultures and mythologies of my childhood influence my art work to this day, and combine with those of my adopted home.

Clay is my medium of choice and I hand build objects from flat slabs of clay.

I create what I call narrative sculptures. The sculpture can be a human bust, or an animal, or abstract, and their surface becomes my canvas. I then design a story or illustration on that canvas that ties the surface to the sculpture.

I started working with clay when I enrolled in a clay class as a way to balance the challenges of a stressful job. I was so lucky to be at the right place, at the right time when ceramics in St.Petersburg started to blossom, creating access to many varied and wonderful workshops with some of the best in the world of ceramics. My self-taught journey in clay was enhanced tremendously by having had the opportunity to participate in workshops with a number of well known ceramic artists, from Mel Jacobsen, Rudi Autio, Peter Voulkus, Val Cushing to Pete Pinnell, Linda Arbuckle, Jason Burnett, and many more, including numerous very talented local artists.

I have enjoyed teaching beginner hand building classes in the past but am not currently doing so.

My work has been exhibited locally in art galleries, and local studios, and I have sold mostly locally, with a few pieces having been sold internationally through personal contacts.

I am not currently exhibiting my work, and am currently re-evaluating where my art journey may be taking me.

Interview Questions:

Question: What made you decide on a career in art?

Answer: I never made an actual decision to have a career in art. As a matter of fact, growing up I was encouraged to take up a “real” profession as being an artist was something for dreamers and would not provide a basis to make a living. So I became a “self taught“ artist, taking classes and workshops whenever I could, and experimenting and exploring clay in my own way, while making a living (sort of) by maintaining a “real” job.

Question: What type of art do you like to create (include the medium, style, etc.)?

Answer: Over the past several decades I have settled into using clay as my primary medium, because I have always been drawn to it. And like any medium, once you delve into it, you discover its endless possibilities, and then you just have to follow whatever direction the medium may take you in. Again, there is so much to understand about its properties when you work in clay, from chemistry to pyrotechnics, that this alone can send you down a rabbit hole! Of course you are also limited by access to equipment, not everybody will be able to build a gas kiln, or a wood fired anagama kiln in their back yard.

I started out wanting to make functional clay pieces, like cups and bowl and things like that, but then I had so many ideas that I wanted to realize and express in clay. So I began hand building figures, structures, and various objects. And I use the surface of those pieces to tell a story.

Most of the time I am intentionally vague about my story on a piece, because I want you to discover your own story in that piece. It is important to me that you discover your own connection in how the work speaks to you personally. I suppose it is my way of seeking and expressing that human interconnectedness through art.

Question: Which artists have been your biggest influencers and why?

Answer: There is no one particular artist I can name that stands out as being the most influential. If you consider the millennia of art in human history I think it would be quite limiting to focus on one single human in that history. We continue to primarily perpetuate the most recognized artist in “western” culture because they are traditional in western art history. I think exploration is the biggest influence in my work. I love to see how art has evolved in other cultures, how it has evolved in our culture and the numerous direction it is taking in the modern world.

Question: What advice would you give new/young artists entering the field?

Answer: If you are interested in delving into the world of clay today, you are in luck particularly in the St. Petersburg area. There are so many options of venues that offer intros into pottery making.

Evaluate what your goals are first. Why do you want to work in clay? If you are at the “I am not sure stage” google “pottery classes in St. Petersburg” and you will find a plethora of offerings.

If you are ready to get more serious, St. Petersburg College offers excellent ceramics classes, where you will be challenged to explore and learn more about the nature of clay, glazes, firings, and to venture into self-exploration.

Question: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the current art industry?

Answer: The fact that the arts are now considered an industry. The “industry”will be fine, we have several museums now, big name arts bringing in revenue etc.

The challenge will be for the local artists, and how they will be able to continue to sustain making their art, while living in an increasingly unaffordable city, which ironically has become so thanks to the incredible proliferation of artists in the area.

It is a pattern that repeats itself everywhere the arts emerge as an industry.

Question: How has the local art industry changed from when you first entered?

Answer: Oh boy, you are taking me back a loooong way now!

I started in clay back in the mid 1990s. The St. Petersburg arts Center was located in a dilapidated little old building downtown. And the Florida craftsman gallery was the only game in town as far as galleries went. No doubt there were a number of artists working in the area, but there was no concerted interest in promoting the arts in particular at that time.

I think what really got the ball rolling in Saint Petersburg as far as the arts are concerned, was the creation of the original Saint Petersburg Clay Company in the late 90s, by Russ Gustafson-Hilton, Charlie Parker, and Stan Cowan. These three artists put clay on the map in Saint Petersburg, and it was the beginning of a tightknit Clay community. They were instrumental in inviting some of the most influential and best known American clay artists of the time to the area, people like Mel Jacobson, Don Reitz, Paul Soldner, Rudy Autio, Peter Voulkos, and others, and thereby creating a wider interest first in clay, and subsequently the arts in general.

It was this original group who envisioned the expansion of the St. Petersburg Clay Company into the historic Train station, which today houses the Morean Center for Clay. I find it sad that their names have effectively been erased from the telling of the story of the arts in St. Pete, because without their vision, I truly believe this would not be the “city of the arts” it is today.

Fast forward to the 2020’s, the arts have morphed into a business model to attract tourists and create revenue for our city. The funkiness of yore has gone, and as in art, nothing ever stays the same.