Bobbi Jeanne's Interview | Ann T. Pierce Introduction

Bobbi Jeanne Quercia

© 2002 Susan Need Canavarro

Bobbi Jeanne, born Bobbi Jeanne Dailey in Monterey, California, has been a working artist for over thirty years. Bobbi is my stepsister. Her mother, Lois Need, married my father in 1961 after many years of friendship. It seems Bobbi and I have known each other since the beginning of time and are destined to be in each other's lives, connected not only through our art, but through our related families and shared half sister!

After becoming involved with music, theater, and dance in high school, Bobbi experimented with clay in her mother's studio. Like all of us growing up in our household, she began her clay work by throwing tiny weed pots which sold well in the family gallery in Mendocino, CA. She soon progressed to throwing larger and larger pots. Being a physically strong person, much taller and stronger than myself, throwing a lump of red clay down on a slab of plaster, pushing and kneading it on the wedging board until it was smooth and free of air pockets, centering the ball of clay on the wheel, and pushing, squeezing, and pulling the wet blob of clay up and down, all seemed to come so easy for her, contrary to my own feeble attempts at wedging and centering. It seemed as if she was born to mold this malleable wet dirt into beautiful things, beautiful large things, while I began, instead, wielding a brush full of watercolor, which was easier to push around!

At one point in Bobbi's career as a potter, she made large floor pots, Grecian urns two or three feet tall, constructing them out of three separately thrown pieces welded together with slip and fired as one huge pot. Her glazes were the earthy greens, grays, and browns, the surfaces rough and textured, giving the pots a heavy, massive yet natural bearing, perfect for a couple of long stalks of pussy willows or the more delicate calla lilies. But bending over a potter's wheel and throwing large hunks of clay into forms soon took their toll on Bobbi's back. She turned to the more meditative hand construction of pinch pots, masks, and figurative sculptures. Over the years she's thrown all sizes and shapes of functional and decorative pots, rolled slabs of clay for floor tiles for her kitchen, pinched into shape many full-bodied bowls, and molded clay sculptures and masks.

Within the past ten years, her work has been figurative sculpture. After she forms two slabs into a torso shape, she uses a round thrown piece for the heads of her figures. The extremities are pushed into shape from the inside while the clay is still malleable, resulting in a piece which represents the head and shoulders, sometimes the whole body, and is curvy and soft, very feminine. One series consisted of just the shoulders with detachable, movable heads, which the viewer/artist/creator could move in several different directions, all the way around if so desired, and thereby affect the expression of the face. Just a slight tilt or angling of the head could change the entire aspect of a piece, giving it a curious interested look, a sad or shy retiring look, or a look of great humor or insight.

Bobbi claims her latest series of figurative sculptures, from the Figuratively Speaking show, were not successful, partly because of the nature of clay and partly due to the time constraints she experienced while trying to hold down a regular full time job, however, she always sees experiences like this not as failures, but as tools for learning, as paving stones for the next project.

In 1986, she opened her own gallery in Duncan's Mills, ostensibly to create an outlet for her own work and that of family members, since we were all making art of one kind or another. Her place was called The Family Gallery for a long time. From then it has changed names several times, artists and their work have come and gone, but through it all, with hard work, her shop, now called The Quercia Gallery, co-owned with Ron Quercia, has remained a constant venue on the Sonoma Coast that supports and encourages local and regional artists. Her's has been a noble deed, indeed.