A certain shade of a particular color, created by a Cal State Long Beach professor

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

Most of the lost cities and the rare butterflies have been found and named—and so this sounds like something that doesn’t happen anymore. But back when he was a ceramics student, Cal State Long Beach art professor Tony Marsh created a shade of blue no one had ever seen. And he filed it away.

It’s never been seen until now, and now it’s on display in his ceramics piece Radiance and Abundance. Actually, it’s on view and for sale through Saturday during Art Auction XII at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

“It just happened by chance one day,” Marsh says of his color. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It reminds me of glaciers.”

Radiance resembles a squarish, delicately blue sort of flower vase with a lot of smaller, white ceramic objects inside. One of them resembles an old ceramic faucet handle. It’s a metaphor, in an azure-like container you’d swear you’ve seen somewhere—except, of course, you haven’t.

“No one else has been able to touch it,” Long Beach Museum of Art Interim Executive Director Ron Nelson says of Marsh’s shade of blue.

“They’re abstractions of the sky holding clouds,” Marsh says of Radiance. “It seemed like the color, I finally found a use for it.” Then he had to find his notes.

“I didn’t have a photo or a color sample or anything. It took me quite a while to find that glaze,” Marsh says. “I wouldn’t say I’m like a scientist. But I do, in a Mad Hatter-esque way, keep just enough notes to get me back.” And he had to paint on the glaze, fire it, and repeat.

“It was the result of developing a base glaze and using another material to give it that color. And then atmosphere and temperature,” the professor says. “It runs if I fire it right. Usually it runs down the sides and I have to grind the bottom.

“But it’s part of the feeling, part of the glaze, the way it covers and moves down the side of the piece. Kind of like water.”

Water that will flow, after Saturday, into someone’s art collection.

ART AUCTION XII LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART | 2300 E OCEAN BLVD | LONG BEACH 90803 | 562.439.2119 | LBMA.ORG | OPEN TUES-SUN 11AM-5PM | $6-7 | THROUGH SEPT 29

Tags: blue, cal state long beach, tony marsh