“Stingray,” wall piece, stoneware, porcelain and crushed glass, measuring 20 inches by 33 inches by 4 inches, by John Cheer.

Cheer was born in China in 1966, at the time of its Cultural Revolution, a period characterized by social and economic chaos. When he was 12 years old, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Torrance, a suburb of Los Angeles, Calif. Sadly, Cheer’s father died when he was in high school, and his mother, who had no job at the time, went to live with Cheer’s sister, who was attending the University of California-Los Angeles on a scholarship. Left on his own, Cheer lived in a friend’s garage while he attended West High School in Torrance. To support himself, he worked after school at a number of jobs, preferring to wait tables or wash dishes at a restaurant for the free meals.

While in high school, Cheer, who says he had always been drawn to the visual arts, took a ceramics class with the first of two teachers who would turn out to be significant influences on his work. One day, the teacher, who always supported and encouraged students’ ideas, was demonstrating how to throw a pot on the wheel. “I thought it looked easy,” Cheer says. “He made it look easy. ‘I can do that!’ I told him. So he gave me a piece of clay. I ended up wearing it!”

Nevertheless, Cheer persisted until he controlled the clay rather than allowing the clay to control him, he says. Then, he discovered that he could begin any form on the wheel much faster than hand-building it, before sculpting and refining it.

“Well, I had this Plymouth Duster ...”

At the same time Cheer was honing his skills in clay he was also developing another skill — bodywork of the vehicular kind.

He had bought a souped-up Plymouth Duster for $800. It had velvet seats, a chrome steering wheel, big back tires, and a rear end that elevated when Cheer pushed a button on the dashboard. What he didn’t know was that he had purchased a car designed for a gang member. “Because of the cultural differences, I didn’t understand this at the time,” laughs Cheer.

The car looked spectacular, says Cheer, but it had constant mechanical problems. To save on repair costs, Cheer enrolled in a mechanics course at a vocational technical school to learn basic repairs. Despite his best efforts, however, the car finally broke down and Cheer was unable to fix it. While it was being towed to a garage, someone crashed into the tow truck and into the Plymouth Duster. … The estimated repair bill was $2,500 — three times more than he had originally paid for the car and more than someone living in a friend’s garage could afford!

An untitled wall piece, made of stoneware, porcelain and crushed glass, measuring 12 inches by 12 inches by 2 inches.

To Cheer, the solution was obvious. He signed up for another course, this time in auto body work, paying for it with the $200 he won in small claims court from the driver in the accident. While learning to repair the car, he also learned how to work with metal, how to do torch work, and how to put a car frame back into shape. When he was finished the course, not only did he have a working car again, but he had gotten a job as a freelance body shop worker.

With the money he made from “body-shop hopping,” Cheer says, when he graduated from high school, he was able to enroll in El Camino College in Torrance to study ceramics. He was now supporting himself and his mother, who moved in with him once he had an apartment of his own.

After finishing the two-year program, he continued doing body work and eventually started his own business on a small scale. He rented time from someone else’s shop, using the space and equipment on weekends, when the shop was normally closed.

From the Far East to the East Coast

Just as Cheer was seriously considering investing in his own body shop and equipment, two things happened. First, California passed a law that toughened the penalties for drunk driving, Cheer says, which significantly reduced the demand on bodywork and had a severe effect on business. Second, Cheer’s sister finally convinced him to move to Pennsylvania, where she had relocated with her husband.

So, in December of 1991, Cheer and his mother moved to Allentown, Pa. “It was a shock! My sister and my mother (who had visited my sister there many times) kept telling me about the trees — all the beautiful trees. But, in December, there are just a lot of bare branches!” But, after two years of uncertainty about the move east, Cheer says he finally began to appreciate the change of seasons.

“Primordial Union,” stoneware wall piece, electric, with holes cut into the clay in the back of the piece to cast a shadow on the wall when lit, measuring 14 inches by 22 inches by 5 inches.

While living with his sister, he took some body shop jobs on the side and registered for a ceramics class at Moravian College, taught by Renzo Faggioli, Master Craftsman Ceramics from Florence, Italy. Faggioli soon became Cheer’s second valued teacher. “He was very good. He taught me how to mix glazes and work in contemporary forms. We became good friends,” Cheer explains.

Cheer also became Faggioli’s studio assistant, and was able to produce his own work and experiment with different techniques. In 1993, he began selling his work at one or two local shows a year, and his intentions of opening a body shop quickly fell to the wayside. “I thought then that if I didn’t [make it with] a full-time business doing ceramics, I would go back to body work,” he says.

Ceramics or body work, though, Cheer knew he had to work for himself. He bought a house and spent most of his remaining money on equipment. While looking for an electric kiln, a local gallery owner told him about a community college that was building a new ceramics studio and was taking closed bids on the old equipment, including a huge, 5-ton gas kiln. Believing it to be way beyond his budget, Cheer still put in a bid that he could afford -— $500. “A few weeks later, I get a call. I had won! … Then I thought, ‘Where am I going to put it?’”

He dug a large area, six inches deep, in his backyard and poured a concrete slab to support the weight of the kiln. Then he spent $1,000 to move it to his yard.
For three years, Cheer worked contentedly in his basement studio and fired in his backyard kiln — until a new neighbor moved in across the street … and didn’t like the looks of the kiln. “She started a petition in the neighborhood stating the kiln would depreciate her property,” says Cheer. “I am two blocks from the Projects!”

Trying to make the neighbors happy, the zoning board told Cheer he could keep the kiln if he had 30 feet of property clearance all the way around it. “That would have put it in my living room!” he laughs.

Adapting to Diversity

He surrendered to the inevitable and moved his studio and kiln to a location near the river in a run-down area with an adult video store on one side and a mechanic’s garage on the other. Though his ceramist friends thought he would never last a year in such a neighborhood, Cheer established friendly relations with his new neighbors and has had no problems in seven years — and no petitions.

After a few years of doing local shows and selling lots of mugs, Cheer decided to focus on more creative work. “My god, I used to sell so many mugs, I thought I might as well get a job as keep this up,” he recalls.

So he continued to experiment with different techniques and materials. With scuba diving among his favorite hobbies, Cheer finds inspiration for the colors and forms of his work in water and sea life. In an attempt to capture the transparent and light-reflective nature of water, he began looking for ways to incorporate glass into his work.

“Spirit,” wall piece, stoneware, porcelain and crushed glass, measuring 19 inches by 22 inches by 4 inches.

It took four and a half years of trial and error, and the burying of many failures in the backyard, before he discovered a technique for incorporating the glass at a level of quality that satisfied him. The technique involves the formulation of a glaze that acts as a binding agent between the clay and the glass. He fires Cone 12, a heavy-duty reduction, using propane rather than natural gas. The firings take 12 hours, and the kiln takes another day and a half to two days to cool. The result is a combination of glass and clay that gets its texture from the cracking patterns of the glass, depths of color, and shine — the look for his stingray forms that he desired.

Looking for venues for this new body of work, Cheer talked with other artists, and read magazines like The Crafts Report for show information. He applied to and exhibited at shows up and down the East Coast.

“I used to have a small truck that I loaded with all my pieces. I packed them in the bed of the truck and even in the passenger seat so tightly I couldn’t move,” Cheer laughs. “If I pulled over to the side of the road to rest, I had to rest in the same position as when I was driving!”

Cheer finds such aspects of being a one-person business the most challenging. “I have to wear so many hats — shopkeeper, driver, delivery boy, cleaner, bookkeeper, artist and business man.” Add to that father to his five-year-old daughter, Sasha, who he cares for one or two days a week while his wife, Diane, works as a respiratory therapist.

“I know I have to produce so much a year to support myself and my family, which means so many pieces a day, and so many minutes per piece. I say, ‘Okay, I can spend 30 minutes on this piece.’ But as I am working on the piece, something happens; I look at the clock and three hours have gone by. I can’t always control time.”

For Cheer, whose work ranges in price from $35-$6,000, it is a constant effort to balance production demands with his artistic needs. It is the main reason he chooses to do only retail — he does not have enough inventory and he can’t increase production without losing his creativity, he says. “I want my work to not only be unusual, but evolutionary, as well as a discovery process.”

Another challenging aspect of the business for him is jurying into shows and balancing his schedule, knowing that for most shows there is no guarantee. He can send great slides and not get in, and lesser quality slides and get in, he says. “I realized I am a full-time gambler now!”

But in spite of all the challenges of culture, economics and neighbors, Cheer does manage to make a living. And thanks to his adventurous spirit, he wants to see how far the work will take him — perhaps into blown glass and metals, to incorporate his experience in body work. “For me, there is a gratification [in creating] an echo of something greater than us within ourselves.”

For More Information

John Cheer 141 East Cumberland St. Allentown, PA 18103 (610) 782-9880

cheerclaystudio@yahoo.com

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