My name is Dylan Kendall. I grew up in several states and went to schools that encouraged a lot of creative thinking. When I was 17, a year after moving to Los Angeles and after graduating high school early, my parents thought it best if I put my energies into more productive activities then staying out late in Hollywood so they packed me up and sent me to Richmond College in London. Four months later, I bolted and began running around the Middle East, eventually landing in Paris.

In Paris, I “unofficially” took classes at Parsons School of Design. That worked. Certain I had found my refuge in art-making, I moved to Oakland to enroll at the College of Arts and Crafts. I got a job in a local bar when I was 20, Bella Napolis, the only black-owned, gay black bar in Oakland and where I learned to pour a mean shot of Courvoisier and back it with a beer. I left both the college and the bar about a year later. I went back to Europe, then to Africa….

Random shots of my first studio when I was 23 years old…sadly I don’t have any photos of the actual work area (since the voyeur in me finds work spaces really cool).

These are mostly shots of the living room where the kiln was. The “bedroom” was the converted work area- covered in clay scraps, glaze tiles, potters wheels and a metal extruder bolted to the wall. I slept about 6 feet away from the electrical kiln on the couch. Fan blowing constantly. Could get a little hot in the house sometimes.

I started making things with clay when I was 22 years old. I had just moved to Los Angeles with a French writer I met in Kenya where I had been living for six months. He wanted to come to Los Angeles for the entertainment industry and since I was a fugitive from the Kenyan law for firing my houseboy, my opinion didn’t carry much weight in the decision-making process. Los Angeles it was. We flew first class from Lamu to LA before I realized my travelling companion was also a fugitive, only from the French law.

We found ourselves in LA without a dime to our names…