Jeff Downing

Originally from New York, Jeff Downing grew up on the New England Coast. His creative beginnings were in music. He studied guitar and music composition at the State University of New York at Purchase. This was the place where he encountered his first ceramics class. Soon after, drawn to the spirit of experimentation and nonconformity that characterizes ceramic art in California, he moved to San Francisco in 1983 with the proverbial suitcase and guitar in hand. Downing founded and performed in several SF-based indie rock bands for the next fifteen years. At the same time, he attended the Academy of Art, San Francisco, to study painting, photography, and ceramics. Jeff went on to earn his graduate degree from San Francisco State in 1992.

Downing has been teaching college-level art classes since 1995. He is a skilled potter and sculptor. He leads a broad spectrum of ceramics courses with specialized knowledge in large-scale clay fabrication, installation, glaze formulation, kilns, and atmospheric firing processes. 

Downing is known for his large-scale public and environmental art projects and figurative sculptures. His work is highly articulated with coat patterns and colors that help abstract their figuration, imparting the sculptures with a sense of the emblematic. The loose, expressive gestures generated from Jeff’s working process further bolster this notion so that the figures succeed in pointing outside themselves to broader concepts relating to human thought and emotion. Despite its ability to convey emotional states, both uplifting and solemn, Downing’s work doesn’t refrain from exuding a sense of humor. 

Downing has exhibited his work in art galleries, museum collections, public art venues, wineries, and private art collections in Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and the United States.  He has received numerous awards for his art from nationally prominent art curators and directors in the field of sculpture. Jeff lives and works in his studio in Novato, California. In his free time, he continues to compose music and occasionally performs live on stage.

I was lucky enough to grow up in New England, “on the water.” A childhood spent along the coast influenced my sculpture, with water a constant in my life and work. As a teenage do-it-yourselfer, I made money selling fresh lobsters I caught in handmade traps constructed from scrap materials. This self-reliance is reflected in my habit of making my own tools, clays, and glazes. These elements of coastal life and references to water reappear time and again in my sculptures. 

On a recent artist’s residency in Mexico, I witnessed first-hand some of the devastating effects of drought. The work I created there I designed to mark the depletion of the water. The project opened my eyes to the power of public art in addressing critical environmental issues.

The region where I live, Northern California, is experiencing a perpetual drought with progressively extended, almost year-round dry seasons. The fiery landscapes of this drought are daily realities that reverberate across the entire ecosystem. This past year, on a road trip across the American Southwest, my view moved inland, but I became even more focused on the water, or, increasingly, on the lack thereof. The evidence was everywhere I turned, dried-up lake beds, dead fish, and acre upon acre of brittle, dying trees—the tinder of inevitable wildfires.

I look behind while looking ahead in this work. With clean, abundant, life-giving water rapidly becoming a thing of the past, a relic of a long-ago age, I chose to inter my watery “relics” (drawn from California’s Lake Tahoe and Mono Lake, and Arizona’s Colorado River, and other threatened environments) in age-old reliquary boxes. At the same time, the ancient symbology of the two-sided diptych reflects decisions made and choices to come.

Over the centuries, in shrines, churches, temples, stupas, and ancient wonders like the pyramids, reliquary boxes have housed relics, from the bones of saints to articles of clothing and other sacred objects. This work embraces water as a relic. Nothing is more sacred than the water that sustains us, and these pieces stand as both dire warning and solemn memorial for an irreplaceable, precious resource.