Lawrence Blazey

(1902 - 1999, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA)

American

Upon graduating from the Cleveland School of Art in 1924, Cleveland native Lawrence Blazey won a Gund Traveling Award and attended the Slade School of Art in London. He returned to Cleveland and taught night classes at his alma mater, with lectures covering topics from ceramics to industrial and architectural design. From the 1930s through the ‘80s, he worked in advertising and industrial design for various firms in Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Toledo. This included co-founding Designers for Industry and Terra Industries Incorporated, serving as chief designer for the Ohio Tool Company, and serving as vice president and chief engineer for Tapco Products, a precast-cement firm in Detroit. Blazey also designed service stations for major oil companies. Just prior to World War II, he played a significant role in the construction of his own one-story, six-room, steel-paneled home in Bay Village, where he lived for 50 years.

In the 1930s and 1940s he painted regularly and showed his works in solo exhibitions at the Korner & Wood Galleries and at annual group exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He was a first-prize winner in the 1935 May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In the late 1930s he studied ceramics at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and subsequently showed in the annual Ceramic Nationals at the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse. He worked as a part-time instructor of ceramics at the Huntington Polytechnic Institute in Cleveland from 1948 through 1956. As late as 1981 he taught watercolor and advertising art classes at the Beck Cultural Center in Lakewood, Ohio. Blazey continued to display his ceramics and paintings at various Cleveland exhibitions until 1992. The artist worked across a variety of mediums, most prominently watercolor and ceramics, but also acrylic and collage.

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