When Ceramics professor Arthur Gonzalez was told about his upcoming retrospective at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado, Boulder, his first reaction was, "Wow, that's exciting!"

Then, his second thought: "Oh boy, am I really old enough for a retrospective?"

The exhibition will take place in 2015. "By the time the show opens, I'll be 60. We're planning it so far out because we have to locate a lot of the work. My pieces are spread across collections in the United States, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Canada, Belgium, and Australia. It'll be a kind of detective-investigation situation. Each piece has its own history -- its provenance -- and some have changed hands two or three times. And then when I find out who owns an artwork, I have to ask them if they'd be willing to part with it for a while. A retrospective tells a story; you've got to have a beginning, a middle, and an end . . . although hopefully I've got a couple more decades to go before it's really The End!"

Gonzalez grew up in a rural neighborhood outside Sacramento. His mother was a seamstress, and his father was a carpenter. Both came from large families; his mother was one of seven, and his father was one of 23 (!) children born to a Nebraska sharecropper. "Since they both worked, I had to find ways as a child to keep myself occupied. I always loved to draw -- I can't remember a time when I didn't draw. My father was literally a Sunday painter. He would do an oil painting at the kitchen table on the weekends. One day, my mom enrolled herself and my dad in a night class in oil painting. He liked to paint, but only having a third-grade education, he was intimidated by the idea of doing it in a school-type situation. So I went with my mother in his place. I was seven years old. I still have a painting that I made in that class. Also, my uncle worked for the state printing plant and would bring home books that were stitched together, with no images, and they'd be my sketchbooks. I'd go through them like water, filling every corner with drawings and cartoons."

Gonzalez started out as a painter. When he enrolled in the MFA program at UC Davis in 1979, he already had two painting degrees from Sacramento State. "I turned to sculpture to give my painting some breathing room. Painting on canvas necessarily means confronting a rectangle, and I was feeling stymied by that edge. Clay, I figured, would be a perfect proxy for canvas. It was going to solve my painting. I feel like, when you are a painter, you have the whole history of painting pushing at your back, and you must step into line with that history. But with clay, you can make the medium do whatever you want. It didn't take long for me to think in terms of objects instead of images. I never made so much work in my life as I did in graduate school. I went through 10 years of development in those two years."

Despite the change of medium, it took the nascent sculptor time to rearrange his approach. "Initially, I didn't like the fact that people could walk around my sculpture. I was still thinking like a painter: Go to the front, that's where the power is. So I hung my work on the wall to take away that rear view and regain control of the narrative."

Gonzalez's group of professors at Davis included Robert Arneson, one of the defining American sculptors of the 1960s and 1970s. Arneson, who would visit Gonzalez in his studio every week, was a follower of the "tough love" school of teaching. "At Davis, sink-or-swim was the only option. No matter what you were doing, the teacher would say, 'Your work sucks, you're wasting your time here, get out.' To that there are only three responses: Leave, make what the teacher wants, or say, 'Screw you, I'm gonna make what I want.' The correct choice is the last one.

"It wasn't the way all teachers taught, but I'd say the method was widely utilized. Arneson truly understood how to use it to get results. It was meant to produce strong artists who would stand up for themselves no matter what -- strong trees that could hold firm against the winds of opinion. It also made a lot of talented people decide to leave art altogether."

In his own teaching now, Gonzalez aims for clarity in everything. "I don't make it cryptic, saying, 'We're doing this today and you'll find out why later.' I explain my methodology and I put my money where my mouth is. I do daily demos, I get dirty in front of my students, and sometimes I fail. I try to teach in ways that I'd like to have been taught when I was that age.

"It's difficult to balance art with teaching. I'm a pretty good hustler, whether it's providing a stack of images for exhibition reviewers or applying for grants and residencies. Every other year I teach a workshop at Anderson Ranch, a fine arts community near Aspen, and at Penland School of Crafts, another 'art camp' in North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My life these days is about as hectic as when I was putting myself through college, working nights at the Libby's tomato cannery in Sacramento. When everything is important, sometimes things get cheated. Sometimes I'm not a good teacher, sometimes I'm not a good artist, sometimes I'm not a good husband. In the old model, the artist is the artist, and everything else be damned. Those guys were often lousy teachers and lousy husbands, and the more charisma you had, the more easily you could get away with it. For my part, I try to address it with a sense of humor. Otherwise it can get too serious."

Gonzalez channeled exactly this kind of humor into his 2007 book The Art of Rejection. "All artists get rejection letters -- for residencies, gallery representation, grants. What most people do is rip them into a hundred pieces, and regroup. What I do is write F-you on them, or draw a cartoon of myself flipping them off. Over time, I accumulated a nice little stack, which my gallery, John Natsoulas, published in a catalogue and turned into a show. It got a lot of good buzz."