Biography
Born in New York City, Marsh first learned about ceramics after he injured his rotator cuff playing baseball in his last year of high school. He had never been that good of a student and was sent by his guidance counselor to the pottery lab at his high school to receive a discipline from the strict and dedicated professor. The day he walked in to the lab, he never left, from then on he knew he would be working with clay. Marsh received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1978 from California State University, Long Beach. From 1978 to 1981, Marsh studied as an apprentice under Japanese potter Shimaoka, in Mashiko, Japan. After receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1989 from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Marsh returned to CSU Long Beach to teach in the art department's ceramics program. He has been the department chair for ceramics at CSU for much of his tenure career.
Marsh credits his experience in Japan with much of his personal development: "Working every day at pottery seems now to have served as a vehicle for great lessons that have stayed with me. I painfully taught myself to speak another language, which in turn allowed me to begin to see the world through the lens of another culture. I was introduced daily to the power, beauty, and confines of history." In this way, the work that Tony Marsh creates is many times refers to the homage of ceramics he hopes to provoke in his work.
Shimaoka's method provided an example for Marsh that contrasted with his experience of art-making in the United States. Marsh says of his time spent at Shimaoka's pottery:
"His art was not the art school stuff (my frame of reference) of taking aim at the fringe in order to explore the new. Nor was it an overly self-conscious attempt at radical expression. His art was homage and a walk through the heart of an enormous and rich pan-Asian ceramic tradition. I have always thought that it seemed more difficult to add to a rich history in a meaningful way when the measuring-stick, by which the contribution will ultimately be understood, is long."
Read more about this topic: Tony Marsh (artist)
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