Bidspirit auction | Jackson Woolley 'Dancing Woman' Enamel

Jackson Woolley 'Dancing Woman' Enamel Portrait - Signed in the lower right corner.    Mosaic: 16” x 12”  Frame: 17 1/2” x 13 1/4”    Condition: The mosaic is in very good condition.    Artist Bio: Jackson Woolley (1910–1992) took a degree in drama at Carnegie Tech and worked as a Shakespearean actor before turning to visual art. He and his wife Ellamarie both learned enamel in 1947 at a workshop led by the ceramist Richard Petterson at Scripps College, and became the leading figures of San Diego's mid-century enamel movement. Vitreous enamel — powdered glass fused to copper at high heat — was cheap, fast and brilliantly colored, and boomed as an American studio-craft medium from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Their early work was functional; from about 1953 they turned to wall-mounted, non-functional plaques, and Jackson experimented with segmented copper panels and layered, textured surfaces. Dancing and theatrical figures run through the work from the start, unsurprisingly given his decade on the stage before he ever picked up a kiln.