Meet your Monitors: Michele Ostrie
Article by Lori Jouthas
Come by the studio on Wednesday afternoons, and you’ll meet monitor Michele Ostrie. Michele, a sculptor, has been a member of the Clay Arts Guild for 22 years, since she and her husband Barry moved to Alamo from Long Island in 1984. After only 2 years of taking sculpting and low-fire classes, Michele became a monitor. “This place was like a godsend,” she says. Being a monitor “forces you to be in the studio, and this is the best place to be.”
A painter since the age of 5, Michele was 15 when she first began working with clay, and she has taken a host of art classes, both public and private, throughout her life. She loved painting, but an addictive personality that made her paint until dawn, and a serious scare nearly 40 years ago, when 2 of her 3 young children swallowed paint and needed to have their stomachs pumped, prompted her to turn her attention to clay. “Painting was very bad for me,” she says. “Sculpting is better.”
Michele describes herself as a “modern minimalist” and enjoys sculpting fantasy images, animals, and the human figure. She never works on the wheel, leaving that branch of clay to her sister Jackie, who is also a member of CAG. Because the interior décor of Michele’s home is very simple and uncluttered, most of her artwork is outdoors, gracing her garden. She loves Renoir and is inspired by impressionism, saying, “it talks more to you; I like sculpture to say something.”
Her favorite thing about working with clay is its three-dimensional nature. “Painting was flat,” she explains. “Sculpture brings way more pleasure.” Recently, Michele was out of the studio for 6 months, recovering from an operation – a tummy tuck. “I sculpted my own body,” she laughs. “But I missed it so much. I missed my sculpture friends.”