Bob Nichols was in his second year of architecture school at Cal Poly when he noticed a friend wearing an unusual ring.
The year was 1967. The friend told Nichols he made the ring and offered to show him the craft space on campus where students in various art programs worked on their projects. It was then that something special caught Nichols’ eye.
“There were eight students sitting at potter’s wheels,” Nichols said. “I never followed [my friend] to where the jewelry area was. I just stood there with chin on my chest, going ‘I’ve got to do this.’”
He describes it as a once-in-a-lifetime epiphany that came out of the blue. For the next 50 years, Nichols would devote himself to ceramics and related media, eventually becoming a professor of art at Allan Hancock College. Now retired, Nichols recently completed work on a new mural project for the school, entitled About This Life. The artist said the piece not only tells a story about his journey as an artist but is also a reflection of his experiences teaching art at the Santa Maria college.
After earning his architecture degree, Nichols and his wife settled into a home in SLO that had enough room for the aspiring artist to set up a pottery studio in the backyard. In 1971, he began making and selling pottery until 1985. It was then that he applied for a grant from the California Arts Council, ending up with some funding to be an artist in residence in Santa Maria.
“It was at a small pottery studio sponsored by the city Recreation and Parks Department,” Nichols said. “I taught pottery making 20 hours a week.”
Arts grants end after three years and require a one-year gap before reapplication for a new grant. In the spring of what would be his final year teaching pottery in Santa Maria, the head of the art department at Hancock approached Nichols.
He started teaching part time in 1988. As the years went by and the college rapidly grew, Nichols moved up to a full-time position, teaching art until retiring in 2017. Nichols said Hancock was and continues to be a place that nurtures artists of all skill levels and career goals.
“Beyond the artist, it’s a remarkable community of faculty and staff that support folks doing their very best work,” he said. “I held the faculty in the highest level of esteem for their dedication to students and commitment to their disciplines.”
José Ortiz, a former superintendent and president of Hancock, was the one who initially sparked the idea of having art on campus. Nichols said Ortiz reached out to a group of art teachers and asked them to consider the idea. Hancock’s Art on Campus committee was born from that conversation and Nichols still serves on it to this day. In 2014, one of the committee members (anticipating that Nichols was set to retire) approached him with the idea to create a mural project.
For the next several years, Nichols labored over a ceramic mural which is now housed in the Student Services Building at the Santa Maria campus. The piece is a sprawling work, spanning 11-by-4 feet, impressive in size and story. The mural is made entirely of clay, specifically low-fire earthenware, including underglazes, multiple glazes, and overglazes such as china paint and metallic lusters. Nichols said there were as many as five firings for many of the pieces in the overall project.
“The best part of this project ... was that it involved continuously having to make new decisions,” Nichols said. “Over the period of working on the project, I realized I was using a lot of my personal references based primarily on my experiences at Hancock of creating curriculum for advanced students so they could continue to evolve.”
[image-3]
The title of the work, About This Life, refers to the title of a work by one of Nichols’ favorite authors, Barry Lopez. Lopez’s About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory is an essay collection that deals with themes of memory and the natural world.
The project is a reflection of the important role Nichols believes public art plays in society.
“Art activates the environment,” Nichols said. “It provides another point of view on what are often institutional buildings. It provides a frame of reference for student artists to explore their talents and create work that then goes on to display publicly.”
But Nichols said for him the most important aspect is how art activates space. Art serves many different purposes and has existed for thousands of years in tandem with human culture, he said. One of the most important functions is that art activates intellect and emotions, especially in a space like Hancock.
“Hancock is a special place,” Nichols said. “Community college is fundamentally a very big and wonderful idea. It’s the largest post secondary education system in the world. ... It’s this concept of making education open to anyone who wants it.”
Arts and Lifestyle Writer Rebecca Rose is fragile ceramic material. Contact her at [email protected].
