Clayton Pond (b. 1941) American, Screen Print in Colors. Titled "Snowmobile," numbered 4/300, and signed in pencil bottom middle. Original publisher label on back.
Overall: 36 1/2 X 46 1/2 in.
Sight: 29 X 39 in.
#3810 .
Clayton Pond was born in 1941 in Bayside, New York, and raised in the Long Island sailing community of Port Washington. As a child he was always interested in drawing and model-making, designing houses, cars, and boats. For most of his teen years he and his peers were heavily encouraged to study math, science, and engineering in order to help the United States beat the Russians in the Space Race. While in his sophomore year at Hiram College he was finally able to choose an elective, and selected art. He left Hiram the following semester and transferred to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to focus on art fully, graduating with a BFA in 1964. He was exposed to Pop Art for the first time at a show in Pittsburgh organized by the art dealer Leo Castelli, and this experience along with his graduate studies at Pratt Institute were pivotal to his career. He developed his drawing style and an interest in bright, intense color relationships in his paintings, as well as discovering the process of making serigraphs. In 1965 he began exhibiting and selling his art and building an exhibition resume. He became affiliated with the Pratt Center for Contemporary Printmaking and joined Sylvan Cole’s Associated American Artists Gallery, where he was featured in their New Talent Exhibition in 1966, the same year he obtained his MFA. That same year his silkscreen prints were shown in the 15th National Print Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and in the Boston Printmakers Annual, where he won the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Purchase Prize Award. The following year Pond’s work was included in a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1967 he joined the Martha Jackson Gallery, one of the most prominent galleries in New York at that time, and had his first solo painting exhibition there in 1968. Martha Jackson Gallery remained Pond’s primary gallery for his paintings and prints throughout most of his career, even after her son David Anderson took over the establishment. Pond was one of the earliest artists to help revolutionize the SoHo area of lower Manhattan. His Broome Street studio in 1966, followed by one on Greene Street that he moved to in 1969, helped strengthen the neighborhood’s reputation as an up-and-coming art hub. The interiors of his studio lofts, and the street-found objects he used to outfit them, became the subject matter for much of his work during this period. For many years Pond printed most of his own work, but eventually his numerous print commissions made it difficult to spend enough time on painting. In 1978 a master printer named Robert Blanton came to work in Pond’s studio, where he printed for and collaborated with Pond. A year later Blanton started his own print shop, Brand X Editions, Ltd, and continues to produce Clayton Pond prints at the Brand X Studio. In 1995 Pond moved to Atlanta, Georgia with his family, where he continues to work in his studio making drawings, collages, paintings, and painted relief sculptures. He spends part of his summers in Vermont and the Adirondacks Mountains of upstate New York, and although Pond has said in the past that he does not identify with one particular movement, critics continue to describe him as a significant voice in both the Pop and Op Art movements. Pond’s artwork has been exhibited and collected internationally, with over 60 solo exhibits. His work is in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Air and Space Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Art, and many more.
