Marti Schoen majored in art and psychology at State University of New York New Paltz and San Francisco State University. She studied independently with San Francisco Bay Area artists and was employed as a commercial artist in San Francisco for over 30 years, working in graphic design, illustration and film animation. Marti’s figurative ceramic sculptures express symbolic motifs and narrative through attention to details and texture. In creating vessels, her interest lies less with symmetry and function, than with balancing the movement of random elements such as slabs torn into pieces, marked and slumped over a uniform shape. Glazes, underglazes and mason stains are applied in broad abstractions that anticipate unexpected fluxes to emerge when fired.