By Craig Lockwood, Special to the Independent
During a gala event, Friday, Feb. 1, at Laguna’s College of Art and Design, college president Jonathan Burke recalled Laguna Beach artist and ceramist, Jane Callender, a valued contributor to the young college’s early origins.
“Jane’s art reached that high artistic level that will forever speak to all of us who love dogs and nature,” Burke said. “Jane’s commitment to capturing the realism and specific aspects of any subject she sculpted fits perfectly with the goals of Laguna College of Art and Design’s sculpture program through the application of representational skills as a way of communicating beauty and meaning.”
Displaying one of Callender’s large ceramic dogs, a French Briard, Burke named LCAD’s sculpture classroom the Jane Callender Sculpture Studio. Callender, a leading talent in the California Art Pottery movement in the 1940s and ‘50s, died in 1973. Her collected original work was recently bequeathed to the College by her granddaughter, Allison Lockwood Hansen, of Chico.
According to ceramic authority Jack Chipman’s “Collector’s Encyclopedia of California Pottery” and “California Pottery Scrapbook: Identification and Value Guide,” Callender’s work holds an enduring position at the highest artistic levels of California’s once-vibrant ceramic industry.
Showing early artistic talent, Callender excelled in both drawing and music at Kimberly Hall, a private girl’s school in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. After studying at the National Academy in New York City, Newark School of Art and Design, and New York’s Trap Hagen School of Design, her education continued at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Returning briefly to California in 1924, she was hired as an illustrator for New York’s Vogue Magazine. In 1926, she met and married Bruce Lockwood, a journalist and overseas wire-service correspondent.The couple settled in Paris and were part of a wide circle of “Lost Generation” artists and writers that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Modigliani and Salvador Dali.
For over a decade, Callender and her husband traveled extensively, as his work took him throughout Europe, before returning to Southern California in 1936, where he began working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Callender’s family had owned property in Laguna Beach from the 1920s, and much of her design work was done here.
Seven days after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of World War II, Callender’s husband was killed. With a child to raise and the United States at war, she was beseeched to sculpt the favorite pet dogs of numerous Hollywood celebrities. Due to wartime rationing of nearly everything but clay, the demand for gift items evolved into her retail line: “Jane Callender Ceramics.”
Callender developed a novel technique to pressure extrude clay to create ceramic hair. Modeling from prize-winning Westminster and American Kennel Club dog show champions, her innovative glazing techniques carefully reflected coat color and texture in a way that had never been duplicated before.
This is a truly amazing story about not just one great artist but the art colony legacy that is at the heart of our town’s character. Think of the caliber of this woman and the adventures she had with her husband in Europe before and after an apocalyptic war engulfed that continent. It is not far fetched to imagine them as two more Americans walking into that gin joint Rick’s in Casa Blanca, enjoying drinks, music and gambling, before catching the plane to Lisbon. Only for her to return home and to Laguna a widow and mother and use her God-given gifts to pioneer and create her own niche, not only in the Laguna art colony but in the ceramic arts of her times. That her legacy lives on at the LCAD is both historical and poetic. Her story is one of romance and fortitude that makes us want to know even more. As a boy growing up here in the early 1950’s, I remember seeing her dogs and being beguiled by the realism. It was a time when Laguna was a center of the ceramic arts and truly marvelous ceramics were everywhere. No summer night was complete without a stroll through The Pottery Shack and the other major ceramics retail establishments in the village. Callender’s dogs stood out among all the ceramics at stores and the art festival. In those days the Art Festival grounds were still covered with fresh saw dust from the lumberyard. The only thing that smelled better than the sawdust was the cotton candy machine! She was one of the extraordinary people that made Laguna a truly diverse community where being different was not just tolerated but valued, unlike today when diversity too often means sameness and denial of what is truly and meaningfully different. Finally, we should thank the Lockwoood family for gifting her collected works to LCAD and our community. In addition to everything else she contributed to our town her son Craig is one of the true originals of his own generation in our town, who as a Lifeguard mentored hundreds of young locals in ocean water skills, good character and civiic responsibility. Craig Lockwood is carrying on his mom’s creative tradition as one of our town’s literary greats, a writer with his own unique style and flair whose books and articles are among the best available anywhere in paying tribute to the beach town and surfing world in which Laguna holds an unsurpassed and legendary status. I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, on February 1, and unable to get back home to Laguna until February 11, or I would have been at what sounds like a wonderful event.