A student of Bay Area Funk ceramicist Robert Arneson, Richard Shaw is known for his illusionistic sculpture. Book Jar with Ashtray presents a three-dimensional still life composed of mail, a pack of cigarettes and a used ashtray, and three books—including "The Art of Craft," a catalog of a 1999 exhibition hosted at the de Young museum that featured this work. With its incorporation of such personal elements, the still life can also be seen as a kind of self-portrait, reflecting the artist’s assertion that “I try to stand back and be the absent arranger, creating a poem about a person using humor, irony, and elegance.” The cancer-causing cigarettes can perhaps be viewed as modern counterparts to the motifs found in seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas still life paintings that symbolize the transience of life, and the inevitability of death.