Be Smart, Buy Art, 1986 earthenware 31 in. (78.74 cm) The Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection: Decorative Arts Museum Fund, 1986. 86.61
Michael Gross
My work is about life; people, religion, sex, cats and dogs," writes the artist. "I never know what the end result will be. I never start out with a plan. I have no patience for planning. I am driven to minute detail, like covering the surface with tiny ghosts, skulls, ticks - when there are ticks in the air, you can bet your life, you'll see ticks in my work. Whatever is working in my subconscious is what you will see. It's the way I work things out. It happens whether I want to do it or not. I guess you can say I am compulsive. I scratch, etch, and carve into the clay. If I make a table, I carve the base out of wood. I do whatever I feel like doing at the moment. Clay is a challenge, I manipulate it one way, it comes out another way. But it's okay. I like it, I leave it alone."
In Be Smart, Buy Art the artist has covered a primitive looking covered jar standing on four wooden legs with a cast of low-life characters engaged in a variety of scurrilous acts. Even the spaces between the figures are filled with ghosts, creatures and ticks - the figures barely have room to scratch. Yet, all of the figures are so preoccupied with their rude and inappropriate tasks what they are doing, they do not appear to mind. However, we tend not to condemn these figures for how they're depicted, but see them more in whimsy, with their unusual spunk and gusto for life, such as it is. Satirically, we're led to see some hope for us all.
Gross was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1953. He has a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater and received an M.F.A. from Ohio State University, Columbus in 1981. He currently resides in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin
  
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