Jay Kvapil is a potter and educator based in California. For the past decade his work has centered on landscapes, and his ceramics are known for their highly glazed surfaces. In recent years, Kvapil has explored metaphorical landscape through glazed rock forms, inspired by the coastal environment near his studio in Sonoma in Northern California. Between 1974-75, Kvapil studied tea ceremony ware in Southern Japan, at the Takatori Seizan Pottery on the island of Kyushu. His ceramics practice is formally tied to such traditional vessel forms; yet he uses raw ceramic glaze materials in abnormal ways to force the materials to melt, fuse, bubble, crawl, and drip in the firing.
"For more than a decade now my work has centered on landscapes,” he wrote in 2024. “Increasingly, they are not re-creations or interpretations of what the eyes see in the distance, but rather metaphorical landscapes seen in the mind’s eye—the space we travel through, not the physical world that we gaze upon in the distance."
Kvapil has received solo exhibitions at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami; Galerie Lefebrve & Fils, Paris; and Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles. He graduated from University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA (1973); and obtained his MA (1979) and MFA (1981) from San Jose State University, in California. Kvapil taught at the University of Hawaii (1984), then moved to California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in 1986, where for thirty-five years he served a variety of roles, including Professor of Art (Ceramics) and Director of the School of Art. His work is in the collection of The Crocker Museum, Sacramento, CA; and was included in group exhibitions at The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), and The Bunker Artspace,
West Palm Beach, FL. Jay Kvapil lives and works in Long Beach and Sonoma, CA.