Ceramic Sculptor, Denise Greenwood Loveless

Finding Perfection in Imperfection

Ceramic Sculptor, Denise Greenwood Loveless

By: Mimi Knight

Photos By: Robyn Arouty Studios

Denise Greenwood Loveless always considered herself an artist. As early as elementary school, she knew art was one thing she could do—and do well. But like many artsy souls, she didn’t consider art a viable career option. Careers were more practical and predictable, at least according to her conservative upbringing.

Even when she “moxied” her way into a career as an art director in the movie industry—a field where she happily worked for 32 years—Greenwood Loveless still did her art on the side. At the time, she was a self-taught metalsmith designing and building jewelry from silver and semi-precious stone. While her film gig paid the bills, she managed to get her jewelry into a few local galleries, where it was enthusiastically received. When she commissioned some jewelry to a wardrobe designer to be used in films, the women working with the designer eagerly bought most of her pieces once filming was done.

But things took an unexpected turn for Greenwood Loveless when she acquiesced to a friend’s repeated requests to visit another friend’s ceramic studio. After just a few minutes with her hands in clay, she didn’t so much choose a career in art as it chose her.

“I made about eight little heads, and I was completely smitten,” she said. She purchased some clay of her own, made arrangements to have her pieces fired, and began working in realism whenever she could steal time away from her film work. It wasn’t long before she invested in her first kiln, but something didn’t feel right. To explain what happened next, Greenwood Loveless employs a favorite Picasso quote: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

Finding Her Voice

Over the next two decades, Greenwood Loveless searched for and found her own voice in clay.

“There are a lot of people doing realism and doing it well,” she said. “But I came to realize I’m happiest in the place where whimsy and fun meet edgy and dark. That’s what has always fascinated me. I want to explore the place where opposites must bump into each other—the place where light meets dark and grotesque meets beautiful.”

Thus was born a body of work that celebrates the human condition with all its quirks and imperfection, frailty, and vulnerability.

“I really fight ‘cute’ in my work, and I sometimes still hear it described that way. But I want my work to send the message that beauty and ‘perfection’ aren’t one-size-fitsall. We’re all beautiful, and we’re all perfect—even with our imperfections. We are perfectly imperfect.”

Judging from the collectors around the country clamoring for her work, Greenwood Loveless isn’t the only one fascinated by these juxtapositions. That career she never dreamed could be a career now has her working in her St. Gabriel studio seven days a week to keep up with the orders coming in from art galleries in Louisiana, Texas, California, Florida, Mississippi, and Massachusetts. She ships to private collectors as far away as Hungary, Istanbul, Italy, and Brazil and fulfills orders for commissioned work.

She’s also been juried into top art festivals around the country and has garnered Best in Show awards from the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, the Arts Festival of Oklahoma, Fest for All in Baton Rouge, Yellow Leaf in St. Francisville, and others. Although she works in series, each piece is one of a kind, primarily made of ceramic, but she often incorporates other elements such as metal, wood, neoprene, and fiberglass.

An Unexpected Muse

As Greenwood Loveless communes with her droopy-eyed, pouty-lipped, bulbous-nosed creations, she has little doubt where and when her inspiration was born.

“Growing up with a severely handicapped brother offered my siblings and me a different concept of what is beautiful and what is perfect,” she said. “My brother, Ken, is perfect and beautiful because he is what he was born to be. Growing up with Ken, my siblings and I were given this incredible gift of understanding what is beauty and what is perfection. And it’s not what Vogue magazine or Hollywood says it is. We get to decide.”

That’s a message Greenwood Loveless eagerly takes into schools, where she volunteers to speak to classes about art—and life.

“I talk to them about how everything on our body we have two of—eyes, ears, arms, legs—we have one bigger than the other. There’s no such thing as perfection. Beauty is found in our imperfections. And at a time when we have 14-year-olds with eating disorders, kids need to hear that message.”

Meeting Her Audience

Greenwood Loveless knows her work isn’t for everyone, and she’s OK with that. In fact, when she and her husband, Jimmy, bring her work to art shows around the country, she says they can spot their customers even before they enter the booth.

“Jimmy will say, ‘You better get ready. Here she comes.’ And I’ll look up to see what I know will be my customer,” Greenwood Loveless laughs. “But we’ve also had people walk in the booth and say, ‘Weird.’ That’s OK. Love it or hate it, but at least I made you feel something.”

For now, she’s hard at work in her backyard studio, watching to see where she and the clay will head next.

She’s begun accepting students—both adults and kids—and says she really enjoys the social aspect of teaching.

And she never wants to forget just how lucky she is.

“I never want to take for granted that I’m sitting here with my hands in clay doing what I love, and I get to call this a job,” Greenwood Loveless said. “I always say, when I die, they’ll have to pry the clay from my cold, dead hands because my dream is to die right here in my studio at 102 doing the thing I love.”