Sculpture for Gary Marsh is an interpersonal expression. From the medium worked by his hands to the response of those who view his art, Marsh’s pieces are a connection to a moment of life.

Gary’s sculptures of the human figure express a full range of human experience. How people love. Pure joy, anger, sexuality, disappointment, need, hypocrisy, self-delusion, are all suggested in his minimalist treatment of faces, gestures and postures of the figure. Yet whimsy, a lightness of attitude guides all of Marshs vision.

Gary Marsh sculpts in clay and other materials including steel and bondo. The clay pieces, while fired at high heat, continue to live in an earthy, organic way, squeezed from the ground, water and grit. Their mud-substance and earthy nature are ever-present, as if his figures were pulled directly by the hand, young and vibrant or tired and slump-shouldered, from an elastic seam of riverbank clay.

As a painter, Gary’s canvases express a grand love of paint and surface effect. He pours as much care into painting the sculpted surface as he puts into forming clay. Paint, layered and peeled back, doesn’t decorate, but exposes the moment of emotion or reveals a character trait, in each figure. The sculpted clay begins the expression process, which is completed when Marsh adds color and texture, layers of gloss. The surface treatment may include buffing, rubbing or grinding color away so the paint is just as lifeworn as the character it’s helping to bring to life.

-- G. M. Kerwin