A Kay Whitcomb Enamel 1966

About the Item

A great enamel by Kay Whitcomb, framed, signed and dated 1966. Titled" Where your Treasure is, there will your Heart be also" A note about the artist: " Whitcomb was born in 1921 in Arlington, Massachusetts, to a long line of New England metalsmiths, the Carr family. In a way, it was almost preordained that her life would be devoted to the crafts. While she hoped to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, financial conditions prevented it. With financial assistance from relatives and friends, she began her art studies at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1939. Whitcomb recalls that in her third year, in 1941, she took an enameling class. Her instructor taught the cloisonné technique. Ruth Raemisch also used the same facilities, working on her enamels while regular courses were offered. Whitcomb recalls being intrigued by Raemisch’s techniques and wanting to emulate the distinguished German-born artist, whose style was based on the Limoges school of enamel painting. She completed her course work at RISD in 1942 while taking additional classes at the Cambridge School of Art. In 1944 she joined the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve at Camp Pendleton, California, where her drafting skills were put to great use. After the war she was able to secure an apprenticeship with the emerging enamel artist Doris Hall. Whitcomb moved to Cleveland in December 1946 and spent four months working in Hall’s studio. Hall’s use of an industrial liquid base coat, obtained from the Ferro Enamel Corporation, was a great revelation to the young artist and would influence her work early on. With a GI loan, she was able to open her first enameling studio in Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1948 three of her enamel works were juried into the Syracuse Ceramic National. After a brief marriage, she moved, in 1954, to San Diego with her two children. With great determination and perseverance, Whitcomb quickly became a prominent part of the vibrant artistic community in Southern California. There her enameling career as well as her organizational skills flourished. Her work explored diverse subjects, and she started incorporating words, phrases, and proverbs into it. She became versed in numerous techniques and started exploring unconventional methods of fusing glass to metal. By the late 1960s she was experimenting enameling on steel at factories in Germany and Belgium. Among her many large-scale works produced at Crahait Emailleries in Gosselies, Belgium, was a pair of eighty-four-by-thirty-two-inch doors, which were shown at California Design 11 at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1971. Her desire to share her knowledge led her to teach enameling at the La Jolla Art Museum and the San Diego Museum of Art shortly after her move to the region. She juried and curated numerous exhibitions and went to great efforts to keep enameling on public display. Besides exhibiting in Europe, she led the effort to have several American enamelists included in the prestigious International Biennial of Enamel Art in Limoges. Her accomplishments are many, and her career in enameling deserves fuller consideration."

Creator:

Kay Whitcomb (Artist)

Dimensions:

Height: 14 in (35.56 cm)Width: 10.5 in (26.67 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)

Style:

Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Enamel

Place of Origin:

United States

Period:

1960-1969