My Teacher Jan Fisher’s Beginnings and the Making of the Program at BYU Hawaii

Jan Fisher came to BYU-Hawaii in
1970 to take over the 3D program
and built it to become like no other.

"No man is an island, but it can be a good place to learn to sculpt!"

LeRoy Transfield

In the still hours of the Hawaiian night when the campus was winding down, the ceramics studio was still a hopping place and Jan Fisher was just warming up into his work and his story telling. The sculpture students, a captive audience, could while away the late hour working and listening to fantastic stories, learning about the life and times of our teacher.  He would lean back, thoughtful, then dart in to add clay here or there to his latest big creation. Always in love with whatever he was working on.  On each piece he would say, it is my best piece ever... ever! In tandem with this was constant speaking, talking (“pontificating”, he would say) on one subject after another.  In story telling, when he wanted to emphasize a bit of the narrative he would stop sculpting, turn his head, raise his eyebrows, open his eyes wide, blurt out the punch line and then bust out laughing with a slap of his thigh. Ah ha ha ha! The more interested you seemed, the more encouraged he was to tell the next fantastic story. You need not speak only nod, agree and laugh too. He told many stories about family life growing up, the good and bad times and all the drama. Ever the artist, many of the students agreed that he should have been an actor.

These stories I’ve pieced together. For this account I’m going to keep to his art career and the interesting journey he had at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, pre 1989. In other words this is all the stuff he did, art wise, before I came to BYUH. These stories and accounts are what I heard, understood and remember. They may be tainted by embellishments or misunderstandings in what he said.  I do have a good memory and those times were so epic in my life, how could one forget them. He also repeated a few of his stories saying them in pretty much the same way and details each time. This account I give is also very brief compared to all the stories, the amazing stories, that he told of things. As I write and form this account, many things come back to me, more than I can ever say.  But as I have said, this is a brief description of his art endeavors, challenges and building the program at BYU-Hawaii that I and many other art students benefitted from.

Jan said he was always into art, painting and drawing at first.  He loved doing water colors.  He said he enjoyed the work he did but it was perhaps a little overworked, too detailed and too much time spent trying to capture every highlight on every hair.  It wasn’t until after serving a mission for the LDS Church in Mexico and a time in the army that he was able to devote himself to art as a student at BYU in Provo, Utah.  He didn’t say too much about his painting journey there.  He said his teacher was good at knowing when to step in and help a student that was struggling.  The solution was often to wipe out the painting and start again.  The teacher he spoke of most fondly was his Industrial Design teacher Alexander Darius. Darius gave out no A grades, only one A- and the rest were B+ down.  Jan made sure he was the one to get that A- and worked long hours to prove himself and learnt a great deal when it was over. Even after retiring Jan would visit this man.

After graduating with a BFA in painting he turned to getting a masters degree.  He decided to switch his interest from painting to pottery. In choosing a place to go to school, he searched out the best he could for a teacher, not only that but the best potter in the country that he could find that was teaching. He found such a person in Oakland, California at Mills College, one Antonio Prieto. I do not know much about Prieto other than Jan said he was the best. In order to get into the program, he travelled to California and presented his portfolio and was accepted into the school.  This in spite of the school being (and still is) a women’s only college. He would say he often got his campus mail titled: Ms. Jan Fisher.

Jan Fisher’s pottery teacher at Mills College, 
Antonio Prieto (1912-1967)

He undertook his studies with great zeal and passion.  Prieto was the man who knew and Jan wanted to know everything he was willing to teach. Interestingly Prieto was taught by Pablo Picasso which meant for me that I had a creative line back to a famous artist.  Jan took on learning everything Prieto knew. He became such a proficient learner that he started throwing pots just like Prieto.  Not only that he started acting like him, walking like him and saying things he said.  The other students gave him the nick name the little Prieto. Prieto started getting annoyed with Jan.

Living in the Bay Area, going to an art school in the 1960’s when experimentation in drug use etc. must have been a challenge for a straight up conservative guy like Jan.  He said that he once went to an art show opening and some of the people there started rolling around on the floor naked.  You can imagine how Jan described that one. While the students where preoccupied with this trend, Jan would spend his nights and weekends in the studio creating.  In order to work late he would unlatch a window and when the studio closed down, would come back later through the window and work into the night.

One morning Prieto came in to the studio to find Jan with a huge amount of work on a large table.  That was it for the professor.  He shouted at Jan, look at all this stuff!  There’s no way we’re firing all this, it would tie up our kilns for weeks! Prieto turned to march out.  As he turned away, Jan grabbed the edge of the table and lifted it toward him dumping all the pots on the ground in one great crash. A cloud of dust and debri rolled after Prieto’s heels as he made for the door.  As the cloud of dust settled, having escaped through the door way,  Prieto now peaked his timid head around the corner at a stewing Jan. As Jan would tell the story he would turn his neck side ways, a silent, disbelieving Prieto. It would leave me thinking: wow all that work destroyed, but what a crash!

Jan was failed by Prieto and had to leave the school without his degree.  But that didn’t stop him.   He went to a local college and got his grades up so that he could finish his courses and get his masters degree.  But Prieto had plans to fail him and prevent this.  I’m gonna fail you Fisher!  Jan said he prayed and looked for divine intervention so that he could still make it somehow pass and, like something out of a movie, it happened. Towards the end of term, before the grades were handed out, Prieto was taken ill.  He actually suffered from what Jan called stiff man syndrome and lying in his bed, slowing lost control of his body withered away and died.  All students were given a passing grade, Jan had his degree. Rather a morbid ending but that’s how Jan told it.

After graduating, he had an opportunity to teach seminary in Samoa for about 3 years.  Then he got his job as art professor at Brigham Young University-Hawaii on the beautiful north shore of Oahu.  By the time I got there, 19 years later, there was a good sized facility for 3D art.  But when Jan got there it was just a small shed that Jan added to, pouring cement and building up structures over the years. Working in the summer months, he once built a very large kiln, doing it all with very little or no help from the school. It was mostly from his own resources or free building materials he could find.  He spoke fondly of how he and a Samoan student, Ed Soliai worked to build a brick vaulted kiln with a 30 foot chimney that could fire pieces up to 9 feet tall. It was a very impressive structure.

The interior of the ceramics studio from my day, my male figure in the center. In the background under plastic is the original Manu Hi’i. Behind my male, a Maori warrior by Ken Coffey. The brick  structure behind Ken’s piece is the large kiln Jan built. The open area in the back had more kilns and a bronze foundry which never ran while I was a student.

During that first decade (the 1970’s) at BYUH, besides developing the program and his own art, Jan faced many challenges, most of which I know little about. There was the challenge of keeping his job, going on sabbatical for a year, divorce, remarrying, and the friction he had with his fellow teachers and the administration.  Artistically he did mostly pots and abstract pieces, maybe a little figure work. He would say he liked sculpture but his ladder was up against the wrong wall. When I got there he was all about the figure, not abstractions. In those early years, not withstanding what he preferred, some of his students did do large figure works such as Ken Coffey (a Maori warrior) and Ed Soliai (Samoan Chief) which were still in the studio when I got there. There was a large abstract fiberglass constructed piece I saw that he said nearly killed him because he worked it up without proper protection and landed himself in hospital on his death bed.  He attributes his recovery to a blessing he received while in the ward.  In the early days he threw big huge pots, taller than a person and developed a few different styles of pottery.  One was what he called a multi-chamber pot which was like several pots inside each other joined and the base, then cut down the middle to reveal the different chambers.  He said he got the idea from sea shells.  The other thing that his students were doing when I got there was crystalline glazed pots.  Very beautiful glass-like glazes that had delicate patterns all over the surface.  But by the time I got there he had personally had it with pots.  His saying was 'a pot’s a pot’s a pot.'

One of the pieces that impacted Jan: Moses by Michelangelo.
Jan would say with great passion: "When no one was looking I jumped the barrier, I reached up and closed my eyes and felt the great nose and slowly ran my fingers down his great muscular arm, tears filling my eyes as I went."

Sometime in his teaching he decided to travel to Europe and toured around to see the great art pieces in Italy and France.  He was deeply impressed by Michelangelo and Rodin’s work and came back a changed man.  He now wanted to do figure work.  There was probably more to his metamorphosis but all I really know is he went to Europe and came back wanting to create great figurative art. He built a foundry, for bronze casting, in the back of the ceramics studio.  He also developed methods for creating busts and life-sized figure works for firing in the kiln using water based clay. This method he called the hollow method or pinch method, he had all his students learn and create figures as well. He started to build a body of work of his own and get commissioned work. All of his private commission work was done at the school. It was good for Jan because renting places to create in Hawaii is very expensive and it was good for the students because we could see a more experienced artist at work.  This included the Koloa Monument, a statue to Manu Hi’i, a bust of a prominent business man in Hawaii, a figure riding a horse for St. Louis High School and a Hawaiian bust for Iosepa, Utah and other smaller projects. There may be others that he did before I came, but these I recall the most. Besides this he also did numerous works in clay right along with the students that were fired in the kiln. These included busts and life-size male and female nudes.  The grandest of all these creations was the huge monument to the Sugar Cane workers which was installed in Koloa, Kauai in 1986. He would say, thousands and thousands of man hours were put into creating it.  Although many students helped, he said the primary student that helped him and put in many hours along with Jan was Dennis Stublefield. When he told of what he and Dennis went through to create that piece, of misery, uncertainty, long hours and exhaustion, all I could think of was, I’m glad I wasn’t there!

A happy Jan Fisher on dedication
day of his Koloa Monument

The commission was actually small monetarily, it was not supposed to be as grand as it eventually turned out to be. Jan may have lost money on the whole thing.  But this was his chance to make something special. Once finished, he now had a large monument to his name which helped him get other works, particularly the multiple commissions he got from the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the Grand Wailea Hotel on Maui. Even though he did many great works through out his career, the Koloa monument was probably his best work. Looking at the castings there are many imperfections, bad pours and low quality finishing work. The Hawaiian’s head is actually solid bronze because the shell broke during the pour (a blow out) and they filled it up. There was no time for a re pour.  It must have been heavy! When it was installed it didn’t even have a proper patina, just the bare sandblasted bronze.  Over the years it has weathered and so that doesn’t really matter now about the patina although some of the imperfections are much more obvious. Understanding and knowing that it was created from such a small budget, by a teacher and his students on the remote north shore of Oahu, with little experience in casting bronze, on a make shift set up...makes the work, the entire finished piece, an absolutely incredible achievement!

Life sized figures of the Sugar Cane workers. Models were student and his second wife Becky, Don Smiler (a maori) was the big Hawaiian(left).  Jaime Mendame, a sculpture student from the Philippines, was the Filipino(right). Other ethnicities are Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese and Puerto Rican. Above the Hawaiian in the blank area was supposed to be a plantation owner on a horse. Jan hated the idea of including such a figure and after two failed attempts to cast the rider, the owner figure was abandoned.

At this point I can not go on without mentioning an artist that had a great influence on Jan, that he spoke of often and would tell us of art principles and philosophies this artist taught to him; a Samoan artist named Mataumu Alisa, or Mat as Jan sometimes called him. Mataumu was ten years younger than Jan and a student at BYUH before Jan arrived.  Back then Mataumu, a new student from Samoa, was so enthralled with art, did nothing else, that he lost all desire for other academics and was eventually kicked out of BYU-H.  He stayed in Hawaii and went to the Honolulu Academy of Arts where he enjoyed much success, learning and selling his art.  He received work from the State of Hawaii to do large ceramic murals. He later decided to come back to BYU-H in the early 1980’s, a family man, and finish his degree with an eye on getting an MFA and coming back to teach at BYU-H, which after a few years he eventually did.  Despite being an older student, he was well experienced and knowledgeable and fell in with Jan and helped Jan with design problems and gave Jan advice. Jan loved it. His influence can be seen in many of Jan’s pieces from that time period, not the least being the Koloa Monument. Jan would say Mataumu was the greatest living artist and stayed in contact with him for his life.  He went in and out of contact with many friends and relatives, but never Mataumu. It would have been nice if I could have had lessons from Mataumu. Jan tried to repeat some of his words to me as best he could, not as good as the real thing, but I somewhat got the gist of it (hah, maybe not).

A huge influence and mentor to Jan was 
Mataumu Alisa seen here in 1975 with the
beginnings of a mural he did for
Moloka’i High School.

A couple of demonstration busts
Jan made to show the students
how to sculpt their pieces
hallow and fire them.

Before I came Jan had another big commission as well that was halted half way.  He was commissioned by Robert Schuller to create a large bronze fountain for his Crystal Cathedral in California. He had made some progress and had some of the ceramic pieces dipped and ready to pour bronze into when the school shut down his foundry for safety reasons.  He had already received money from Schuller.  Jan tried to install all the necessary devices to make the kiln legal under the new requirements but they could never get them to work right and it bought the whole bronze casting operation at BYUH to an end.  Jan had to pay back all the money he had been advanced.  When I got there I saw the students had cast bronzes at one time, but for the whole 4 years I was there the foundry never ran and it never would again.  All bronze casting Jan did after that was molded in Hawaii and sent to the mainland for bronze casting and then the finished piece shipped back.

The small Manu Hi’i, renditions of Christ, life sized ceramic nudes and the clay sketch for the Robert Wilcox statue

Jan had many faults and problems. People loved him for his passion, being bold and getting things done.  People hated him because he was too bold, said too much and got too many things done which made their lack of productivity uncomfortable. All his art was not the absolute greatest. But he did have flashes of brilliance. He put everything into the tasks he set for himself and all his art students benefitted from it. He never felt threatened by any students that made a good piece of art, he reveled in their success. He was willing to share any insight he had. His enthusiasm was contagious. That is what set him apart among his peers at BYU-H and other programs around the country. This was the stage that was set when I entered the Ceramics Studio as a freshman student in 1989.

Surrounded by sculptures, supplies and equipment, my friend Debi Brown poses for me in the mucky Ceramics
Studio.  Behind her is one of the never to be finished ceramic shells, ready for a bronze pour, for the Robert Schuller fountain at the Crystal Cathedral. Up above to the right on a shelf is my now fired sculpture of my Christ Healing the Blind Man.

The original large kiln fired Manu Hi’i
that was molded and cast in bronze.

Raku firing: Lab assistant Bryan Draper places a red hot pot in a barrel of sawdust. The blast kiln was also used for melting wax out of the ceramic shells for bronze casting.