‘I seemed limited in awakening my own creativity.’

Rhoda Lopez’s clay sculptures and murals can be found in many public and private places up and down the state. In a San Juan Capistrano bank hangs her stylized depiction of California’s history. Closer to home, Lopez’s work hangs in the foyers of the Ramada Inn in Old Town and the Juvenile Court in Linda Vista. The Pacific Beach sculptor also has constructed a 3-ton clay “Memorial Wall” on the side of the Unitarian Church in La Jolla. Lopez came to San Diego from Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1960, to join the staff of the La Jolla Museum Art School as a ceramics teacher. Besides her teaching, she spent 18 years in the employ of architect Sim Bruce Richards, sculpting fireplaces and other works for private clients who wanted not just a home, but a unique piece of art. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed her, and Vince Compagnone photographed her.

I was a potter first, and I got my training at one of the best schools in the country through one of the finest ceramists in the world, Maija Grotell. But my husband was the one who did these paintings (in their home), and he was quite well known and quite successful, and he never seemed to lack for inspiration. He always seems to have an important comment to make, on whatever he worked, and I finally became very dissatisfied with the potting because I had a feeling, “Is this all there is? Don’t I have more creativity than this? If I do, how do I get to it?”

I knew I was very good at awakening the creativity in my students, but I seemed to be limited in regard to my own self. So I began to just concentrate on creativity, discovering for myself, because nothing very good was written on it. From the viewpoint of the very creative person, psychiatrists and psychologists don’t seem to understand at all. I took the better part of about three years in this, and it became just a fascinating study to me, and, at the end of the period, I was doing the sculpture entirely. And while I still taught ceramics, the sculpture was what I was really interested in.

After my husband died, I continued to teach ceramics and work for myself, but I also took a job as medical artist at the University of Michigan, and I had to tighten and tighten and tighten to do that. I stood right in the operating room right behind the surgeons, and I had to paint and draw everything that I saw going on in front of me. I did that for 7 1/2 years, and it was a challenge, but when I came out here, I was still awfully tight. One of the things that was very important to me in this re-evaluation was loosening, getting back to the freedom of drawing and some spontaneity.

I got to the point where the learning was more important than anything I could produce. I would put a board on my lap and I would put six damp bricks on this. I ground some bricks up for mushy clay and I put a pile of clay on top of the six bricks all at one time, and then I’d say, “With these six bricks, I will only allow myself my thumb as a tool. What can I do on these six bricks with just my thumb?” Maybe the next one I would use a little piece of scrap wood or the end of a beer-can opener or a little piece of metal. Then I began to discipline myself further. How many can bricks can I do in an hour? In 45 minutes? In half an hour?

I had recently been to the Yucatan, and I was so impressed. When I came home, I wanted to do something on Yucatan, not to replicate it, but to get an evocation, an impression of it. And, as long as I thought about it deliberately, I ended up with something corny or tacky or cute or ugly. But, when I finally said, “To heck with it,” and I think I very often said “To heck with it,” it was as if I was pushing it back into my unconscious and, suddenly, there was what I wanted in front of me.

The most dramatic example of that was when I was going to do two fireplaces for a Jewish family and they made no request except they said they would like one of the bricks to be a menorah, put down low enough so that their children could reach it and run their hands over it. I thought that was such a touching thing, and I wanted to do a very good job, and I tried and tried and tried. And it got corny or ugly or it got cute. It was just dreadful. I remember saying, “Maybe I can’t do this.” So I just put it back, and, all of a sudden, there was my menorah, as good as I thought I was capable of doing. I never touched it again, and I was very satisfied with it. It seemed that so often, if I didn’t set out deliberately to do it, but I just allowed it to come out of me, that I succeeded.