Meet Gail Blank
Welcome to the official site of Gail Blank, American artist born 1940 in New Orleans, Louisiana (also known as Gail Perrin Blank and Gail Perrin Keenan.) She died in 2005 and in 2011 the Gail Keenan Art Center was opened in her name in Longbeach, Mississsipi.
Gail began making ceramics in 1971, and print making in the late 1990’s. She had been a doodler from a very young age and was known for her outlandish signature all her life. She created thousands of pieces of ceramic works, original drawings and prints. The majority of her work was hand designed and hand painted ceramic pottery. She also created sculptural works out of clay, experimented with raku, and her work clearly evolved over the years.
Her work often celebrates the female form, in a playful, sensual and whimsical manner. The main feature of her work is often a nude voluptuous woman or two, immersed in nature or with animals, exuding sensuality and fantasy.
Gail Blank’s ceramics are unique forms covered with colorful birds, leaves and human figures, their forms ranging from tea sets to bowls and plant stands. She has taught ceramics privately in addition to teaching at the Stroke Rehabilitation Center, and five years at Santa Cruz High School.
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“I wanted my pots to be ‘unusual’ and non-klunky,” says Gail Blank whose work is now on display at Santa Cruz Public Library until December 14. Her pottery features original designs which are painted on the pots three times with each color of the glaze, and which usually portray flowers, animals or fantasy figures. “Generally I use black for the background, then choose glazes which will stand out,” she says. “When I first began painting on the pots I was making, all the glazes ran together and the colors were obliterated. It took about four years of experimentation to learn the technique.” Gail was born and raised in New Orleans and attended Newcomb College of Tulane University where she majored in philosophy. She married Les Blank who was working toward a master’s degree in playwriting, and came with him to California in 1960. They later separated and Gail, who had been studying pottery at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley, took the couple’s two children and came to Santa Cruz County to live. “I tried my hand at gardening, building a round house, milking goats and living without electricity,” she says, “but I soon became disenchanted. The rain and living with two children in a small trailer convinced me that I should find another place to live.” She found a cabin in which she still lives, in the Bonny Doon area where she first had settled. “I enrolled in an adult education class in ceramics when I first came here, with Mark Levy as the instructor. I became intrigued with clay and that’s when I started painting on the pots I was making.” Gail two years ago volunteered her help to Levy at Santa Cruz High School and also at the same time was working.
Santa Cruz artist Gail Blank’s opinion of Playboy, in contrast to WAVPAM’s, is a case in point. While she doesn’t like current issues in which models pose totally nude, she found the earlier Playmates with covered genitals to be a “celebration of nudity, showing that the human body is beautiful.”Blank, creator of some “erotic ceramics,” was one of the participants in a recent two-day “critique of pornography and celebration of the erotic” in Santa Cruz entitled “Eros & Pornos.”
To her, pornography is “like an off-color joke. One person can tell it and it’s OK. Another person can tell it anti disgusting. “To me, the erotic stimulates. It’s suggestive. The pornographic offends;it doesn’t leave much to the imagination.
A new exhibit at the SC Art Center this month features the work of Gall Blank, a ceramics artist who specializes in raku. The process entails plunging pieces straight from the kiln into a material that burns, resulting in a charred surface. Gail decorates her ceramics with pictures of birds, horses and nudes. “Actually, I’ve been trying to cool it on the erotic stuff,” she says, “but I keep coming up with erotic figures anyway.”
