originally written for:
'Butlleti Informatiu Ceramica'
Barcelona, Spain

After initially viewing Dick Hay's February, 1996, exhibition of his art work at Indiana State University's Turman Art Gallery, I found myself returning for many more visits, sometimes alone and sometimes with other artists, collectors, critics, and just plain folks. There were forty-seven works which were vessel in subject and which seemed at first viewing like rather traditional, common formats. As I was drawn back to the gallery again and again, it became very evident to me that an exquisite, powerful clarity and quite uncommon aesthetic rightness were fueling my responses to a new manifestation of ancient forms. It was as though a powerful bird of prey had flown back to its nesting ground for purification and new life.

In 1964, as a twenty-one year old Bachelor of Fine Arts degree graduate of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, Dick Hay had spent four years firmly grounded on and in Ohio clay. His basic training as a visual artist seemed to him at that point like a Chinese version of a military academy. The undisputed master of this training was Professor Henry Lin, the distinguished and influential ceramic artist and teacher, now Professor Emeritus at Ohio University. Lin gave him art values and life values that Hay still adheres with great fondness and respect. To say that Professor Lin was a 'father figure'is to verbally trim the enormous power he wisely exerted for many fruitful years.

The hawk-like skills of keen looking and judgement, as well as the zeal for soaring perfection of visual ideas and forms are life lessons Hay learned from Lin. Hay has often recounted to me and lectured to audiences around the world his memorable experiences as an assistant to Lin from 1961-1964. My favorite image is that of the composed Professor Lin briskly walking out of the studio for lunch saying to Dick Hay: "Make twelve globe forms exactly alike and have them set up and ready when I return." Upon returning, as the story goes, Lin like an inspecting general, reviewed the forms and reduced each one to the blob of clay from which it came with one masterful, critical stoke of his hand. The highly disciplined use of the wheel, kilns, tools, clay, and the minded control of form and color were respectfully and lovingly embedded in the artistic soul of Dick Hay. By 1964, the keen eyes, powerful hands, and ambitious, imaginative phantasms of Hay were producing art works of outstanding professional quality. His work exhibited such superior craftsmanship and design skills that he was awarded a scholarship by Alfred University, New York state's prestigious College of Ceramics. From 1964 to 1966, he would test himself against many of the top talents and most challenging instructors in the world. At Alfred University, all of Hay's previous training and aesthetic theories about clay as a medium came under critical scrutiny. He knew quite well the handling of clay as Professor Lin had set forth, but the sky above him opened up with a frightening and troubled depth of field. Like a young hawk, Hay was ready to fly. He dared to enter the revolutionary atmosphere of contemporary ceramics where the thunder and lighting of Peter Voulkos and Rudy Audio charged the scene. That courageous, gutsy journey has been flown by Hay with great style and originality which has earned him professional and critical acclaim. Dick Hay became a dazzling artist, a sculpture in clay. By 1966, when he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Alfred University, he had enriched his artistic skills and moved his professional ambitions into high gear.

In 1966, Professor Robert Montgomery, the distinguished metalsmith, urged Professor Elmer Porter, Chairperson of the Department of Art at Indiana State University, to upgrade and thoroughly professionalize the ceramics area. Montgomery urged Porter to call Alfred University and request the paprers of its top graduate student. Porter reviewed Hay's papers and the rest, as they say, is history. Dick Hay was hired immediately. At Indiana State University, he has established a first class, well equipped studio and has engineered highly professional Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degree programs which have become the envy of most art departments in the nation. In over three decades of Hay's leadership, highly influential artists, teachers, and administrators have made their way from Indiana State University into the ranks of admired, effective, and widely exhibited professionals. His Master of Fine Arts degree graduates are sought after for teachings positions by universities throughout the country.

Hay's leadership in the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) for seventeen years is well documented. He has held virtually every office in that organization, including the presidency from 1979-1980.

During the 1966-1986 period of Dick Hay's academic life, over and above the expert teaching, programmatic development, deep involvement in the growth and influence of NCECA, a packed lecture and workshop schedule, Hay produced a vast body of high quality clay sculpture shown in international and national art exhibitions. In 1974 he began figurative clay sculptures which showed a dramatic change in sensibilities and a versatility in image making. These poserful works can be best described as neo-surreal, since they used impersonal mannequin forms pressed from molds in a metaphysical way. Throughout the mid and late 1970's, Hay showed us a poetic, unsettling narrative sensibility that established his reputation once and for all as a sculptor of merit.

After a decade of his technically brilliant, poetically tragic, and often blackly humorous images, the high flying artist felt compelled to land again, having completed a grand circle into the aesthetics of clay as sculpture. He came back to the terra firma of vessel formats.

His technical virtuosity have never been set aside. He draws constantly, which is quite evident in his latest work. The color shapes and nervous lines, the Jungian image of circles and hands that enrich the vessels are wonderfully free and reflect a humorous delight in handling clay.

The best insights I got, however, into the aesthetics in clay from Dick Hay were not verbal. I viewed the February exhibition at the Turman Art Gallery with the distinguished Boston designer Sidney Swidler of Sasaki Associates, who was in Terre Haute for the exhibition and whose energetic pursuit of art work for his collection is well known. He had just purchased two magnificent vessels from the exhibition for his collection. He said very little, but looked a lot. His face was a bright revelation. I was sure that Dick Hay, the imaginative hawk, had landed.

Dick Hay had left Ohio as a superb craftsman and has subsequently found a professional identity as a distinguished, honored artist and educator. After observing his thinking and working in clay for the past twenty-eight years, I am certain that this firm home ground of archetypal vessel forms will be revised again and again. The wider audience that has become increasingly aware of the art of Dick Hay can only be excited at the new aesthetic revelations in clay that are coming during the next years.