Paper porcelain collage created during my residency at The Shangyu Celadon International Center in Shangyu, China. Piece inspired by my visit to Jing’an Temple in the midst of the bustling city of Shanghai.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/arts/design/mondrian-hague-music.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-time-cutoff-30_impression_cut_3_filter_
Blue has always fascinated me. My best friend was called Bluebird because she always wore blue. My other best friend had blue eyes the color of stormy skies and was always a bit checked out. I have difficulty speaking to people with blue eyes and find myself stuck on their eyes and not the conversation.
What is blue? It’s a color of calm that leans towards darkness and depression. It’s the sky and the sea, all vast and unknowable. It’s a cold color yet draws you to itself. It’s Levis bluejeans, trusty and rugged. Yves Klein named his own blue and if anyone uses it they basically have to reference him. Blue is the color of the sublime, God, Yahweh, and David. It’s racist and aryan yet still prized and the eye color of preference.
In ceramics I avoided blue. It felt too done too over used. I remember a students love of chun blue glaze that broke to pinks and purples that made my skin crawl. “Cash- flow” blue is a craft fair saying. So somehow just that term was enough to turn me from this unknowable color. The only place I use blue is in my signature underneath a piece. I loved examining the blue blurred line, just the perfect amount to be readable but immersed in the clay like a million year old stone.
In China I kept my distance from the amazing cobalt brush work of Bai Ming only to sneakily do some tests of my own on the side with his precious block of hard cobalt. In Dehua I made my guide drive me around in search of a blue I had in my mind. Determined it could only be found in China. After many studio stops and translation confusion I finally snagged a bottle of someone’s special cobalt underglaze. My final piece there was a cobalt and porcelain painting.
So today as I walk around my garden and watch the many almost blue flowers emerge I am still mystified. What is blue? I have delphinium, hostas, hydrangeas, bachelor buttons, centurea, veronica, borage, lupins, and babtisia, all oddly not true blue. It’s so hard to pin down and infinitely hard to capture in a glaze.
This filled me with so much emotion today. I have such respect for this mans work and words. Meeting him was one of the greatest highlights of my career. Thank you Bai Ming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF9G9kticuY
Click here to see an article from the Shangyu Celadon Press!
I spent two months in the very modern factory city of Shangyu China http://www.shangyuceladon.com/en/profile.aspx searching for my romantic version of China. Housed in a hotel next to three large malls I took daily hikes through the city streets searching for silk, ceramics, and old world crafts people, anything that could satisfy my imagination. What I wanted was long gone replaced by synthetics, plastic, and Adidas. Street sweepers, gardeners, sweet sellers, and ad hoc food vendors became my window to the old world. Tasks that harkened back to a feudal society. I became focused on the ubiquitous Chinese gardeners hat and kept asking where I could find them. Certainly not at the mall! There wasn’t a hardware store to be found. Finally someone found me one. Obsessed with its form and material I had to make a mold of it. It felt like an object that should be prized and immortalized. In these crazy Covid 19 times it feels even more valuable as it is a symbol of people who work the earth and garden.
Thinking about all the generous friends I made in China over the past two years. From the Masters to the assistants, translators, drivers, doctors and everyone else who was there selflessly interested in helping me. I am forever grateful for what they shared and showed me in Dehua and Shangyu. At the moment the studios are closed and the WeChat notes I get are all asking about MY health and happiness. Typical.
Some pics below of the beautiful people who never complain!
Wishing Master Lin, Daisy, Jaixin, Sheli, Tom, Lu, Han, Lee, Wong, Lillian, Mary, Sioban, Men Ful, Bai Ming and all their families health.
Beautiful gallery in Western, Ma. Here is a view of my work with featured artists Fern Apfel and Ali Osborn who are having an opening this Sat. Feb 8, 2020. Check them out!
https://www.pulpholyoke.com/
Hat tip, gratitude and appreciation to and for Paul Donzella, whose beautiful gallery includes my work with so many other gorgeous objects.
If you’re in the city, check it out:
Held at the historic Park Avenue Armory in New York City, the fair highlights a dynamic mix of works dating from ancient times through the present day and maintains the highest standards of quality in the art market. Each object at the fair is vetted for authenticity, date, and condition by a committee of 150 experts from the United States and Europe.
The pieces Paul is showing are part of my Organofuturism line :)
In Shangyu, China I was working in a facility that encouraged experimentation and discovery. Bai Ming’s last words to me were “All the things you discovered and thought about here in China will not be fully understood until you are home and have some perspective on the experience” How true these words were. I tried to blog while I was there but because of the constant action and decision making I opted to heed Bai Mings words and allow the trip to unfold with some needed perspective. It is now the new year- 2020 and I want to pass on some of my time in China to whomever is interested.
Paper porcelain parts in giant electric bisque kiln.
I met Master Lin the day I arrived in China. On my travelers high I tried to keep up with this mans energy and enthusiasm. The encounter began with my first official tea. A wild ceremony of splashing water and clinking cups. The tea goes from water kettle, to teapot, to small strainer pitcher then finally to your tiny teacup. I was entranced, mesmerized by the sounds, and in awe of the perfect porcelain pieces.
View of Master Lins salesman, Shali and shop below studios. Tea serving is part of the shopping experience and a major part of social life.
Our studio tea table, and hang out.
Master Lin in Dehua Museum of Ceramic Art
Porcelain is the softest smoothest most sensual of all clays. It has an ethereal otherworldly quality. Its lightness makes you want to pick it up. Its smoothness is skin like and seductive. I love its vibrant white ground which shows off slips and glazes like no other clay.
In China they don’t even call porcelain “clay”. They call it Cí, which does not translate into a western word. Porcelain is a French word meaning “cowrie shell”, a shell that has the luster of porcelain and was used as currency by traders who shipped Cí. In the US we call porcelain “china” which is weird, and gives you a sense of my first few weeks of being lost in translation in Dehua, China where I was an Artist in Residence at The Blanc de Chine.
Within my first 12 hours of arriving in China I was introduced to the man that would guide me for the next month and a half, Master Lin, the warmest most sensitive person an exhausted newbie like myself could encounter.
Holding Master Lins tea cup.
Guanyin statue that stands by the Chanxi River, Dehua
http://www.blancdechineicaa.com/residency_programme/
So excited to be invited to Blanc de Chine International Artist Residency, Dehua, China. All porcelain. All white. I have no idea what I’m getting myself into but I do have my travel visa. Stay tuned.
Camille Henrot's pieces remind me of a mother who has gone ape shit. Her powerful installations have the suggestion of order and domesticity except they have exploded. Her organized abandon leave me curious to know more about the experience. A delicate line for visual artists.
Kali creator and destroyer of time.
I am very attracted to art objects that are imbued with an internal life. I think one of the things that first attracted me to ceramics was the intrinsically implied life force of the vessel. The container that carries the metaphor for that which can carry, hold, protect and create life.
Ruth Asawa's work has a motherly quality. It has a sense of feminine protection, form holding form- protector of children and nature. Her enclosed pods have a gentile embracing vibe. They are soothing whole objects, self contained and autonomous.
Martin Puryear's work also captures an internal life but in a different way. Pleasing to the eye yet charged with an aggressiveness. His pieces feel like they are on the verge of exploding. He creates volumetric tensions that push out into space. Thrilling powerful forms.
Just like dance, pottery has its daily practice. You warm up with some standard shapes, cups perhaps, and then move on to more complex forms. The adagio happens when all your haptic muscles are warmed and you can effortlessly flow through forms. Beyond touch, your mind and expression are all synced up.
For me Picasso was always the ultimate vision of an artist who luxuriated in an endless flow of creativity, basically he was always warmed up. He is my romantic vision of an artist at peak performance perfecting and re ordering imagery.
Picasso jumped back and forth between 2D & 3D drawing. The energy of his 2D work is enhanced in clay because he could literally dig into it. Weight of line takes on a new meaning when clay is involved. Edges, corners, turns, and diminishing points become physical form that control space.
I can remember the first time I saw a Hans Coper pot. How powerful and otherworldly it was! A perfect sculptural vessel. His work was modern and timeless at the same time just like the ancient pots I had admired at the Met.
Calder like Coper was feeding off the european trends set by Mondrian and the Bauhaus thirty years earlier. As abstract as this work may appear it is all formally based and touches that internal core that influences my work.
The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.
- Alexander Calder
I think most artists have a few nagging images that are stuck in their minds whenever they create. For me it has been Indra's net.
The following parable from the Buddhist canon provides a beautiful visual metaphor for the interdependence and interpenetration of all phenomena.
Suspended above the palace of Indra, the Buddhist god who symbolizes the natural forces that protect and nurture life, is an enormous net. A brilliant jewel is attached to each of the knots of the net. Each jewel contains and reflects the image of all the other jewels in the net, which sparkles in the magnificence of its totality.
When we learn to recognize what Thoreau refers to as "the infinite extent of our relations," we can trace the strands of mutually supportive life, and discover there the glittering jewels of our global neighbors. Buddhism seeks to cultivate wisdom grounded in this kind of empathetic resonance with all forms of life.
- from "Thoughts on Education for Global Citizenship", a lecture given by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda at Columbia University on June 13, 1996.