Joyous Art Exhibit Honors Hotchkiss School’s Legacy

I laughed out loud reading Leslie Horn’s online piece, “A Completely Attainable Guide To Getting Rich and Following Your Dreams.” It’s about a sculptor, John Mosler, who went to The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, then Princeton, prospered mightily in the derivatives market and gave it all up to work in a fabulously renovated Brooklyn warehouse, now sculpting for a living and getting attention in arts magazines and newspapers like The New York Times.

First, Horn cheekily advises in her guide, be born rich. Mosler was. Mosler Safes.

Attend great schools. Ditto.

Go to work at Lehman Brothers.

Study with an extraordinary pottery teacher. He did that.

Quit finance, probably forever.

Finally, work hard, exhibit and innovate.

So, John Mosler did all that, and when he was invited to take part in an exhibit at Hotchkiss, he entered “Femina Corporus,” a wood-fired porcelain figure — a woman being born, as one might see it, out of fire and drive and a will to make art.

“Becoming: 30 Hotchkiss Artists” is an entertaining and joyous exhibit of paintings, video, constructions and sculpture by 30 Hotchkiss graduates. The show honors the 125th anniversary of the school’s first commencement.

Early in the exhibit is Spencer Finch’s “Study for a Meadow (following a bee),” which features gentle pastel splashes connected by a slim line of ink, the bee in its wandering.

There’s Morgan Bulkeley’s oil, “Think of a Bunny,” full of wild animals and fellows with shotguns caroming about the canvas with comic-book clarity and careless menace.

Then there is Lindsay McCrum’s “Greta, Napa Valley, CA,” an elegant woman seated on the floor, photographed with her guns for hunting and a great stuffed stag with shining glass eyes.

There’s Hotchkiss graduate and art teacher Charles D. Noyes’s watercolor, “October Light on Selleck Hill,” and Finch’s pastel and pencil on paper: “Fog, Lake Wononscopomuc,” about seeing and not seeing at the same time.

Unlike some of the men and women in this show, Mosler, the sculptor, was not drawn early to art. He attended a pottery class at Hotchkiss by Blanche Hoar. “I did not take it seriously,” Mosler said in a phone interview. “But she challenged me. It doesn’t matter what you make, she said. It’s the integrity you bring to the process. She commanded respect,” he added. “She opened the doors to creativity.”

And the doors to problem solving, a skill as vital in finance as in art. 

Later, still in finance, Mosler studied with the famed ceramics artist Toshiko Takaezu, who mentored him, and a decade ago, he finally followed his “true task” and worked exclusively on the stuff of sculpture, its engineering, materials, treatment and its ideas.

“Femina Corporus” is a dark, mineral-flecked porcelain of a woman, leaning over a little. She, like ancient sculptures unearthed in Greece, “is meant to look like found art,” Mosler says. She has just part of one arm, the other seemingly lost to time, and she is bathed in subtle glitter and muted color through layers of burned ashes. She is startling. An expression of Mosler’s ideas about beauty. She is also an expression of his skill and technique. 

The figure, fired in a wood kiln for 40 hours, reaching a temperature of 2,400 degrees and strewn with hot ash, “turned out beyond my expectations,” Mosler says. This “improbable” work in terms of balance and heat and materials accomplished his objectives, he added, to make art. 

“Becoming: 30 Hotchkiss Artists” runs at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery in Lakeville through June 18. For hours and other information, call 860-435-2591 or go to www.hotchkiss.org/arts.