Ceramic Color; Centering on the Afterthought

A collection of writings from artists, scholars, educators and critics.

Index

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………. 4

Standards of Beauty……………………………………………………………….. 5

Bernard Leach on vitality of materials………………………………………………… 6

Soetsu Yanagi on beauty in regard to tea………………………………………….... 7

Rosanjin on subdued color…………………………………………………….………... 8

Marguerite Wildenhain on color, form, nature and art………………………..... 9

Brother Thomas Bezanson on truth in color use………………...…………….. 10

Paulus Berensohn on being one with material………………………………….. 12

Ramifications of Unpredictability…………...…………………………………... 14

Viola Frey on investigative approaches…………………………………………... 14

Peter Voulkos on glaze frustrations...………………………………….…...... 15

Philip Rawson on general expectations...……………………………………….. 16

Michael Cardew on virtue of necessity...…………………………………………. 17

Robin Hopper on ceramic color circumstance…………………………………... 18

Daniel Rhodes on color or form…………………………………………………... 19

Linda Arbuckle on skill and restraint….………………………………………….. 20

Warren Mackenzie on futility of intentions….……………………………………... 21

Peter Voulkos on dumb glazes….………………………………………………... 22

Historical Application……………………………………………………………... 24

Betty Woodman on cobalt respect….……………………………………………. 24

Philip Rawson on green….………………………………………………………... 25

Edmund De Waal on white….……………………………………………………... 26

George Woodman on problem of color…………………………………………... 27

Inspirations and Influences……………………..……………………………….. 29

Philip Rawson on gloss..…………………………………………………………... 29

Val Cushing on poetry…………………………………………………………….... 30

Richard Devore on texture……………………………………………………….... 31

Betty Woodman on sources….………………………………………………….... 31

Ron Nagle on choice….……………………………………………………………. 33

Janet Koplos on Toshiko Takaezu ……………………………………………….. 34

Jack Troy on fire science ………………………………………………………….. 35

Kirk Mangus on red….……………………………………………………………... 37

Conclusion……………………..……………………………………………………. 38

Sources………………………………………………………………………………. 39

Introduction

Ceramic color is astoundingly diverse and many of the effects out-match and outlast any surface that can be achieved through a paint medium. While technical information on how to execute color is plentiful, theoretical readings on ceramic color are few and far between. The formal ramifications of color choices in studio pottery are largely undiscussed outside of references to painting. Ceramicists that approach their surfaces in a painterly fashion are given high praise, partly because art critics understand how to frame the discussion around said surface. However, ceramic color is vastly different from paint medium in two major ways; it is 3 dimensional and it is created through a material transformation.

Color and surface is often an afterthought in American studio pottery practice. The absence of discourse surrounding theory related to ceramic color sends a message about the insignificance of color in the critical reading of a ceramic object. The complexity of ceramics as a whole leaves little room for traditional color theory and the unpredictable nature of glazes leads conversations amongst makers towards serendipity or pity versus intentionality.

While form is the center of most ceramics dialogue, there must be something said of the unique qualities of color in ceramics by artists and scholars. An examination of a wide array of texts has illuminated context and attributes that are specific to ceramic color. Excerpts of texts are provided here to form a sort of collective ceramics color theory. This is not a prescriptive overarching theory, but rather a way to explore the ideas about color that are specific to the field of American studio pottery from 1940 onward. The culling of texts is organized under 4 subheadings: standards of beauty, ramifications of unpredictability, historical applications, and influences and inspirations.

Standards of Beauty

The history of studio pottery in ceramics has been shaped by the Arts and Crafts movement in Great Britain, The Mingei aesthetic from Japan and the Bauhaus style of schooling from Germany. To begin the exploration into ceramic color scholarship, readings by pioneers of the field of American studio pottery are provided. Ceramics’ most honored artworks are marked by the integration of form and surface, that is to say that one would not stand up without the other. However, many of these preliminary text, which formed the intellectual basis for the field of ceramics, reveal a bias which is the groundwork for color and surface as afterthought, discounting the expressive potential of color.

Each author in this selection holds strong ideas for standards of beauty. Within the subtext of these standards is a place for color which is sometimes coded as infantile, feminine, vulgar and marginal. Marguerite Wildenhain, while not having a disdain for color, does state that a ceramic artist must choose either form or color as their primary interest. These attitudes about color are not separated from traditional color rhetoric. In David Batchelors book, Chromophobia, he chronicles this prejudice and the oppression of color which is bound in language and film in western culture.1

Specific to American studio pottery is the relative shortage of scholarship and reliance upon pedagogical methods to transfer the ethos of pottery. The seminal texts in this collection are still some of the most important documents in the field. Examining some of these color attitudes side by side illuminates a bias which denies critical understanding of color in the reading of ceramic objects.

1David Batchelor, Chromophobia, (London, Reaktion illustrat ed, 2000).

Bernard Leach

A Potter’s Book, 1940 (pg. 134)

Bernard Leach is known as the “father of British studio pottery” and A Potter’s Book was considered the “bible” for many 20th century potters in Europe and America. He merged the worlds of Japanese folk craft aesthetic with that of the Arts and Crafts movement in the West. A primary concern of Leach’s life’s work as an author, artist and educator was truth to materials. In this passage, he focuses on the devitalizing effect that industrial standardization has had on color in glaze and emphasizes nature.

During the last century we have suffered far too many ingenious attempts to make pottery look like anything but what it honestly is; even metal, glass and wood have been imitated. Besides this, during the same period the industrialization of pot making has involved such a heightened degree of standardization of material that it is now no longer the universal practice for potters to know their glaze materials and to make their own glazes. It is even difficult to-day to make the old glazes, because the simpler, cruder and more natural materials have given place to others which although chemically purer, are at the same devitalized. From the standpoint of character standardization is inevitably deadening. If the reader will bear in mind what I have already said on the subject of cobalt he will find it is not an isolated case, for the same principle runs through most of our commercial practice, and is inherent in all mechanical processes. Quantity may necessitate standardization but not false standards of beauty, and in the trade it is not only the necessities of large output which rule but false conceptions of beauty. As far as glazes are concerned, part of the trouble is a forgetfulness of what constitutes character of materials. At the moment in other trades besides pottery this being increasingly felt, both here and on the continent, but as a rule a certain lugubrious element in English tastemakers our decorative efforts look dull beside the French for example. When we think of the artificial and nauseating obviousness of the ‘broken colours’ of trade fireplace tiles, in which rutile plays the part which open firing and less purified ingredients used to do, we can only turn with relief to plain

commercial glazes. But even if we compare the plain glazes on our table-wares with the most straightforward and rather similar glazes of the Ting ware of the Sung dynasty, or the porcelain glazes of the Ming period, what a profound difference there is! The one is dead, the other alive.

This ‘life’ in the old glazes is due in large measure to the presence of elements in the raw material which the old potters either did not know how, or did not desire, to eliminate. The most common was a small percentage of iron, which in the Ting wares produces a creamy colour, and in Ming porcelain a greenish tinge. If they had removed this and other ‘impurities’ as we call them, at least half the vitality and charm of the glazes would have vanished. And curiously enough, if we to-day, usually because we cannot buy our raw materials unrefined, artificially try to return to glazes their variable or inherent characteristics (for nature is never stereotyped), the results are not the same, they look precisely what they are, self-conscious. I do not say that it is impossible, with greater subtlety of perception, so to obtain moderately good results, but i do urge a return to nature if only to learn greater humility.

Soetsu Yanagi

The Unknown Craftsman, written 1952, published 1972 (pg 148)

Soetsu Yanagi had a background in philosophy and was the founder of the Japanese folk craft movement, Mingei, in 1924, which later had a broad impact on American studio pottery. In this passage by Yanagi, he describes color’s place in relation to the Japanese tea criteria for beauty.

The second point in regard to Tea is that it formulated criteria for recognizing beauty at its height-and that not idealistically but through such concrete features as form, colour, and design. Many words were invented to describe the beauty that was to be the final criterion, and of them all perhaps the most suggestive is the adjective shibui ( with the nouns shibusa ), for which there is no exact english counterpart. Nearest to it perhaps, are such adjectives as “austere”, “subdued”

, and “restrained” , but to the Japanese the word is more complex, suggesting quietness, depth, simplicity, and purity. The beauty it describes is introversive, the beauty of the inner radiance. Another way of approaching its meaning is to consider its antonyms : “showy”, “gaudy”,”boastful”, and “vulgar”. When it comes to color, shibusa tends toward a plain monochrome of some tranquil and unobtrusive hue, such as black, brown, or soft white; in form, something simple and peaceful: if it is decorated, only a few strokes of the brush.

The same reticence-this shibusa-characterizes much of Japanese poetry and dancing as well as the school of painting know in Japan as nanga. Painting of this school is usually characterized by the exclusive use of black ( which may be described either as a colourless colour or an all-inclusive colour ) and by extreme simplicity of style, the result of the boiling away of all complexity. Very often large areas of blank space are present; and such space is not empty, but implies and suggest something immeasurably large. Deeply imbued with the philosophy of Buddhism, nanga inevitably subscribes to the criterion of shibusa, a vital part of the inheritance of the japanese, nurtured by Buddhism and disseminated by tea.

… (pg 153)

The lingering on the self may be likened to looking through coloured spectacles: one is gazing at objects through the color called ego and therefore one cannot see them as they are, one can only see them enveloped in something else.

Kitaoji Rosanjin Informal Talk at New York State College of Ceramics in Alfred, NY, 1954 (pg 1)

Rosanjin was a prominent Japanese artist with a background in calligraphy and ceramics. His talk at Alfred coincided with a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum

of Art in New York City. Below, Rosanjin’s coding of bright color as feminine and infantile reveal a predilection that subdued, muted colors are more refined or erudite. This inclination was imported to America on the back of the Mingei craft aesthetic as is palpable in the work of many postwar potters in the U.S. While reading these sentiments, keep in mind that Rosanjin is known well for bright overglaze enamel ceramics as well as wood-fired pots.

The pieces exhibited at the Japanese Fine Arts Exhibition, were, I hear, subdued in color and, if I put it in our Japanese expression, unsuitable for women and children. That is to say, red, blue, or other brightly colored works which may be readily appreciated by women and children were very few in number, yet the fact that so many people appreciated these pieces shows that that was due to the unbiased intuitive powers of the American people. This is a great delight to us Japanese. In the paintings, too, the Japanese were quite surprised upon hearing that the American people praised and admired the several paintings in black and white, like those of Sesshu. Even in Japan, those who can appreciate black-and-white pictures are said to be limited to a few outstanding connoisseurs. Nevertheless, the American people immediately admired those pictures. From this fact, I, as a Japanese, was very much delighted to note that the American people’s liking is by no means restricted to “Ukiyoe”. Judging from such appreciation I feel that the time is not too distant when artistic pottery will be rightly appreciated.

Marguerite Wildenhain

The Invisible Core; A Potter’s Life and Thoughts, 1973 (pg 48)

Marguerite Wildenhain was a German potter trained at the Bauhaus who immigrated to America in 1940 to escape Nazi Germany. She began Pond Farm Pottery in California in 1949 which integrated the hands on attitude of the Bauhaus with mentorship from Marguerite. As she states below, her work is concerned mostly with form but here she

shares her interest in color as it relates to biology. This passage exemplifies the separation of focus, on either form or color, and suggest that a potter may naturally choose form.

Is there a relation of Color to Form and what is the relation between movement or rest to expression? And what about light and dark in relation to Form and Expression? As you can see, this is a tantalizing search. What craftsman would not want a clear-cut answer to all these distressing questions he poses himself as he faces his daily work? Though Nature is rich and generous, she is also mysterious and incomprehensible, of which I am glad. There is no one answer to the understanding of Life and every one of us will have to find the solution that seems for him the best, unconcerned with the solutions his fellow-men may have found. I realize that I seem to have stressed Form about everything else; that is perhaps because I am a potter pre-eminently occupied with form. Of course, for another artist it might be color and line that would be most stimulating. It is obvious that Color too as such and in relation to pattern and design are part of Nature, perhaps even part of the very purpose of Life itself. One sometimes wonders why shells, flowers, bird, and other living creatures all have different and varied patterns, dots, lines, spots where there seem to be no special need for them. Biology, one imagines could work with far less artistic display, less color, and less imagination. Apparently, at least as I see it, Beauty as such, beauty of form and design is actually plan and part of the total meaning of nature and cannot be separated from it. Planful Form and Order inside of Necessity, with Variety and Imagination seem to be the way of Nature as it is the aim of every artist. The parallel is striking and inspiring to me.

Brother Thomas Bezanson

Studio Potter VOL 14, NO.2, “Potters on Color”, 1986 (pg 62)

Brother Thomas Bezanson was a Canadian Benedictine Monk who is known for his pottery which is strongly influenced by Chinese and Japanese culture. Brother Thomas

describes the peripheral nature of color in art and ceramics specifically. This text shows the relationship to spirituality in American studio pottery which clearly defines color as corporeal.

Colour delights me, or rather it delights senses, but I have come to realize that, beautiful as it must be, it is a peripheral beauty. It is on the fringes of the realities that art expresses. And those realities have levels that must be reached before anything beyond the narrow shores of the senses will emerge. It is important to the truth of my experience to say that the greatest works in pottery are a harmony of the outer sensory elements: colour, form, and function. To achieve this synthesis is to have moved inward to a level beyond simply beautiful colour, a beautiful form, an honest function. I believe that it is this harmonious synthesis that makes potter a great art in itself and a valid metier for the expression of artist. In this it is at least equal to painting and sculpture. In my work process itself, I do not make glazes for the sake of the form, or form for the sake of the glazes. I work on each for the sake of itself. For me they are distinct processes with their own emotions in me. To work on colour and glazes is an “upstairs” experience, intellectual and mind-involving until the color itself emerges from the the fire and is transformed, articulating the beautiful. The process of form is, on the other hand, a “downstairs” experience and has a contemplative content for me, drawing me into silence. But there comes a point where glaze and form must come together. Paradoxically, even though I work on them separately, they are related not by conscious planning but by an interior intuition. This is a signal to me that the whole process has been coming from within from the very beginning and that these elements of form and colour are personal tribulaties of one interior experience, and they become pathways back into that experience, carrying consciousness with them of an encounter with transcendental experience. If one is only concerned with glaze for glazed and form for form or unconcerned with one or the other, then the harmony is not achieved and some motive other than inner experience is at

work. Often when they remain separated, function steps forward to dominate and then we have the case of five shapes in four colours.

Paulus Berensohn

Finding One’s Way with Clay, Pinched Pottery and the Color of Clay, 1972 (pg 94)

Paulus Berensohn was an avante garde dancer who pivoted to pottery and spent nearly 40 years associated with the Penland School of Crafts. He was a writer and an educator who found immense poetic satisfaction in the material of clay.

Using color at the start was an experience of color as form and form as an experience of color. It helped me feel more connected with the whole piece from start to finish. It wasn’t long before I started wedging these clays together, inlaying them and experimenting with adding oxides to various clays to increase the range of my palette. That palette is now quite extensive, and I take a great deal of pleasure in using these clays and watching them change from the wet clay state, through the drying, the bisquing and finally the high firing. The color of clay is an altogether different visual and tactile experience from the color of glaze. The textured surfaces of the colored clays remind me of vegetable-dyed yarns in their dappled inconsistency. The use of colored clay has by no means lessened or substituted for my interest in achieving color by glaze; having both to draw upon separately and in concert enlarges the possibility of expressiveness. But it is more than the colors themselves that have been of principal importance for me, for this exploration with color has helped me move into a new relationship with design that has to do with my attitude to whole process of forming. It has helped me to experience design as emerging form that involves color: not design as an afterthought, or pre-thought, but design as a cooperative, mutually dependent activity of form and color. … (pg 114) One Could easily become seduced by this technique and the possibilities of all this color. You could make all kinds of exciting pots using these colored clays and handling them in these ways.

But how do we go beyond technique of it all, the flash of it? How do we bring ourselves to state of being and working in which we use these techniques out of necessity; technical necessity, yes, but also inner necessity? We need to use this color to feel or say this about clay, about working, about our world, about our life. Can I use yellow clay, today, to express my joy at the smell of spring in the air? Or what about those bluebirds that came to my feeder this morning, can I celebrate them? And what about my despair and my nervousness and my irritability. Can I sing in color of them?

Ramifications of Unpredictability

One of the elements that sets ceramic color apart is how notoriously difficult it is to achieve reliable results. The physical transformation that the materials take in a kiln could happen in an array of kiln atmospheres which can and mostly likely will alter the color quality of the materials. The technical and complex nature leads to general expectations for color and thus produces general readings of color in a finished object.

This selection of texts elaborates on the ramifications of unpredictability in American studio pottery. Some contributors, like Peter Voulkos, share their “pedagogical methods” on color which raises the issue of color theory in ceramics education. With technical information in the plenty, how to is much more important than why when it comes to color. This collection is intended to provide provide some of the nitty gritty of color actions upon form.

Viola Frey

Studio Potter VOL 14, NO.2, “Potters on Color”, 1986 (pg 50)

Viola Frey was a prominent California funk ceramist and educator at California College of the Arts from 1965-1999 where she had influence on potters coming through the program. Her large scale colorful figurative sculpture challenged clay’s status as a craft medium. This passage exemplifies an encouraging voice in the pursuit of studying ceramic color. One ramification of unpredictability of ceramic color is the development of a scientific approach to produce results. This shapes the unique position of chemistry in the ceramics art classroom.

I do feel that ceramics is about the study of art, without having to decide whether it is painting, drawing, sculpture, or design. We don’t want ceramics to be sculpture or just painting, which in

history it has been. We want it to stay ceramics. But the student needs to study those areas as part of tradition. The student needs both a formal background and an intuitive approach. No one should feel they will lose a fraction of their intuitive feeling by reading about color. Itten, Chevreul, Goethe, Klee - I don't agree with everything they say, but they are what the study of art is about. A student of ceramics can translate color theory by means of liquid line blending, or triaxial blanding. It doesn't matter if you’re inaccurate, just so long as you know that it was this spoonful and this thickness. Line blending also means going back and forth between dry, glossy, and runny. Keep in mind light and dark, warm and cool, and I like to throw in soft and hard. Then transfer that to the surface by underglazes, stains, glazes. High temperature glaze is low temperature underglaze and almost all the colors are brilliant. After that, it’ll be had to keep ‘em down on the farm.

Peter Voulkos

Clay Talks, Reflections by American Master Ceramicist, 1999 (pg 68)

Peter Voulkos’ ceramics are often referred to as the ceramic canon and he is considered the abstract expressionist of clay. He had a background in painting and functional ceramics but is known most for his large scale sculptural stacks which exploded notions of craft and function in relation to ceramic vessels. Below, Voulkos describes his frustration with the unpredictability of ceramic color perhaps giving insight to clay’s historical station outside traditional art mediums.

But I didn't always do things the easy way. Take my experiments with glazes. I had been trying to figure out how to destroy form by using color. I put all these colored glazed on the pieces to destroy form in order to recreate three dimensions with color. I put all these colored glazes on the pieces to destroy form in order to recreate three dimensions with color. Eventually that got to be too much of a head trip - I about went nuts. Anyway, I couldn’t get the right colors with glazes.

You’d put something in the kiln that looked green but it would come out red. Then you’d put red in and it would come out green. Then you’d put red in and would come out green. To a painter, that’s enough to make you crazy. Plus you had to wait eight hours to see what it would look like. I thought, “Why not just paint it on the surface?” So I started using acrylic and epoxy colors.

Philip Rawson

Ceramics, 1971 (pg 128)

Philip Rawson was scholar specializing in Indian art and practices. His book Ceramics presents complex aesthetic principles in clear form and has been widely referenced in American ceramic pedagogy. This passage illuminates how the general expectations of color out of a kiln have lead to general readings of color in the ceramic object.

One has also to remember that the potter’s clay and glaze materials are not, when he uses them, always the same colour as they will be when they are fired. So the ceramic decorator is always aiming at an imagined, prescriptive effect ; and very often he is prepared to admit into his intention the result of accident, of the hazards of the firing process. Except in the most highly industrialized processes the potter’s colour intentions may thus, to some extent, be general rather than specific. For he may be working with naturally available substances which can only give him a restricted range of possible tones, and with kilns whose atmosphere cannot be controlled with absolute precision. Thus only rarely has he been free, as a painter is, to produce complex colouristic effects of his own free choice. And only since ceramic chemistry took substantial steps during the eighteenth century at the hands of the chemist employed in the great court potteries have certain colours or infections become possible at all in glazes. Instead, as has been mentioned, the potter and his patrons have been content to accept conventions of colour, and to take their often narrow limitations as given aesthetic constants.

Michael Cardew

Michael Cardew: A Collection of Essays, 1976 (pg 68)

Michael Cardew was an English studio pottery who worked and taught in west Africa for 20 years of his life. He is also well known for his technical research and documentation on ceramic materials in his autobiography, Pioneer Pottery. Below he discusses making a “virtue of necessity” to expand the color palette available from the locally available Nigerian materials. His passage shows how conditional color in ceramics was before industrialized pigments became readily available.

The character of the stoneware made at Vume and at Abuja was always strongly determined by the local clays, and since these always had a rather high content of iron oxide, it was necessary to make a virtue of necessity and to explore the wide range of colour and tone which can be obtained with such materials. During most of my time there we had no plastic white-firing clay for making a white slip, and so for sgraffito decoration we used a black slip (lateritic ironstone mixed with the local clay) which was even darker than the body itself. We also used a clear, transparent glaze which on a white body would have given a pale celadon colour, but on our produced a much deeper colour, almost a bottle-green, like deep clear water, with glowing touches of iron red at the edges where the glaze is thinner and the iron oxide from the underlying clay takes possession. Under this glaze we sometimes used a non-plastic white slip, a fifty-fifty mixture of kaolin and feldspar which enabled us to inlay the incised decoration so that there was a contrast between the dark green of the body and the pale celadon of the inlaid design. Lighter colours became possible when we obtained zircon sand from the tinmines of the Jos Plateau, and found that our ball mill could grind it fine enough for an opaque glaze, thus providing a white ground for painted decoration in brown (iron) and blue (cobalt). Cobalt carbonate was the only material which we had ever had to import from abroad, and of this we only used a few ounces each year.

An entirely new extension of our range of stoneware colours was the vivid opalescent blue, which is not due to cobalt or to any other coloring oxide but is a purely ‘optical’ effect of the interference of light-waves ; hence it requires a dark ferruginous background material to develop its full intensity. This discovery was the result of a combination of happy accident with patient study of an entirely ‘unconventional’ material, the whiteish, coral-like masses which used to accumulate in the ashpits of the wood-fired kiln. It is evidently a fused wood-ash, a glassy slag or socria which forms where the temperature of the ashpits is high enough, if the ash itself has a high content of silica (a characteristic of the local hardwood ashes). Under these conditions it will fuse , and turn into slag or clinker. We ground this new material in the ball mill and used thirty to thirty-five percent of it in a glaze batch which gave this vivid ‘optical blue’ , provided the firing conditions were suitable. This colour has now become the main characteristic of Abuja stoneware and is easily the most popular with the Nigerian public.

Robin Hopper

Robin Hopper Ceramics: A Lifetime of Works, Ideas and Teachings, 2006 (pg 187)

Robin Hopper was a Canadian artist, author and teacher whose publications have been used widely by students of ceramics. He taught all over the world as it was his mission to demystify the science of ceramics to allow for free expression within the medium. This passage explains ceramic color’s relationship to traditional color theory.

Painters are blessed with many color theories developed by artists and scientists over almost 350 years, since Sir Isaac Newton’s first color and light theories in late 17th century England. Perhaps the color theory most used today is that developed by Johannes Itten, Swiss designer and color master at the Bauhaus in Germany. In my most recent book, “Making Marks,” there is a chapter related to color theory with a condensed version of Itten’s system. There is no need to repeat that chapter here, but a hint of color theory is useful, since the buyers of our work inevitably look at the color of what we do in relation to the environments that the art will become part of. Household living environments tend to be color coordinated according to standard color theories. We don’t need to make pots with somebody’s draperies in mind, but it is amazing how

many people try to match them. I feel strongly that knowing color theory is a great help to bridging the gap between maker and buyer. The average human eye is capable of discerning 17,000 color variations. With experience, the ceramic artist can probably match almost all of them. Being able to play with color at will gives the ceramic artist a tremendous advantage in the personal exploration and development of an individual expression in this medium. Color theory for ceramics hardly exists, since glaze development for most studio potters is primarily a hit-or-miss affair, but it doesn’t have to be.

Daniel Rhodes

Clay and Glazes for the Potter, 1973 (pg 76)

Daniel Rhodes was an artist, professor of ceramics at Alfred University for 25 years, and author who had a background in art history and painting. His numerous ceramics publications are a valuable part of the collective knowledge that the field still relies on today. This passage reveals some context for why ceramic form and surface are often thought as separate concerns.

With glazes, slips, and decorative processes the potter enters the world of color and two-dimensional surfaces. As an art, pottery has occupied a unique position somewhere in between sculpture and painting; that is, pottery forms which are highly dimensional and voluminous in character have been clothed in colors, textures, and motifs which relate to painting and drawing. This marriage between form and graphic has not always been a felicitous one. But in the best example of pottery, there is a successful fusion of two- and three- dimensional elements in a way that is quite unusual and does not suggest a hybrid art. In most of the traditional pottery shops of the past, glazing and decoration were considered a separate craft and were assigned to specialist who took no part in the actual shaping of the pots out of clay. But the individual potter today, who usually carries out all processes himself, must be something of a master of both form and color, a synthesizer and welder of many elements into unified wholes. It

is scarcely surprising that in this difficult task some artists put their emphasis primarily on form, restricting themselves to simple glaze effects, while others prefer to work with less concern for form and more for the more painterly qualities. The history of pottery could be studied from these two viewpoints- form and surface. The chinese, during the earlier periods at least, seemed more concerned with form than with surface, while the Persian potters tended to regard pottery shapes as so many tabula rasa upon which their marvelous fantasies of color and line could be spread. As a medium of surface embellishment, and aside from practical qualities such as durability, glazes have some uniquely valuable properties. The total range of glazes from low-fired to high fired permits an almost limitless palette of color. Transparency and opacity can be controlled as well as reflectance and mattness. Color blending, controlled areas of color, linear patterns, textures, and flow can all be manipulated. Depth of color is possible, and one layer may be applied over another to give an optical mingling of color. Because of the large number of variable in the reaction of glaze materials, glazes are almost unbelievably various in color and texture and historically glazes have been used for widely differing esthetic purposes. Poles apart are the old chinese Ju glazes, for example, with their dense opaque surfaces resembling smooth white marble when seen in moonlight, and the incredibly brilliant domes and facades of the mosques at Isfahan, with their thousands of square yards of shimmering blue and turquoise glazed tiles. The blazing color of Hispano-Mooresque lusters, the earthly roughness of German salt glaze, the pure cool whiteness of porcelain- all of these are varying examples of the glazer’s art.

Linda Arbuckle

Studio Potter VOL 35, NO.1, “Learning to Use Color”, 2006 (pg 58)

Linda Arbuckle is a potter and professor of ceramics at the University of Florida. She is well known for her masterful use of majolica glaze and brightly colored natural designs. Here, she describes the complexities of diving into ceramic color, which illuminates how

even with the increased availability of materials and pigments, the ceramic colorist must still be dedicated to research.

We live in a world where color is taken for granted. Black and white pictures or movies are very intentional events in the twenty-first century, while big-screen color is everywhere. The World Wide Web allows people to broadcast images across the globe, cheaply and in color. Inexpensive inkjet printers output color documents in a rainbow of hues. Fiber dyes give us clothing and textiles in shade not seen in the 1900s. We assume color and color choice in products as the status quo, but learning the use and significant of color is often overlooked, or assumed to be an intuitive talent. Making effective color choices is a skill that demands observation, thought and practice. Using color in ceramics is an exercise in restraint. The color that can be achieved in the studio is wonderful, but it is fraught with special rules that rival “I before E except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh.” The technical and chemical aspects of colorant-flux interaction make ceramic color more complex than mixing paint. There are few WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) opportunities in ceramic process; changes in firing make composing color during glazing an exercise requiring experience and pre-visualization, as well as a benevolent nod from the kiln gods. The bonuses are the variety of surfaces, color variations, depth of color, and reflectivity that are difficult to achieve with room-temperature surfaces: the glory of minute trapped bubbles in a frosty Chun glaze, the wonder of a bead glaze, the tactility of a lichen surface.

Warren Mackenzie

Warren Mackenzie, Potter: A Retrospective/Warren Mackenzie, Teacher Followers in the Functional Tradition, 1989 (pg 36)

Warren Mackenzie is a potter and educator in minnesota with an initial art background in painting. He is credited as the link which brought Leach, Hamada and Yanagi’s

Mingei style to American studio pottery. Mackenzie’s passage sheds light on a ceramics ethos in which managing input from the kiln is part of the practice.

WM: A potter is different from a painter in that once you commit the piece to the fire, you have no possibility of revision. I mean the fire contributes a great deal to it, but you can’t say, oh, I wish I had done this or I wish I had done that and go back and retouch the way a painter can.

DL: Many of the things that happen to a pot in the kiln are unintended.

WM: If it doesn’t offend me, if i’m willing to use the pot in the house, then i’m willing to put it out for sale. If it’s blemished in a way that I consider an ugly disfigurement, I will break it, or even if it comes out of the kiln unblemished but ugly, I’ll break it. But I’m very cautious about breaking pots because I believe that when we look at the pots coming out of a kiln, we tend to see what’s not there and not what’s there. The plate I showed you the other day - I splashed on that green, rust, and black over a pale gray background, and I visualized this coming out one way, and it came out completely different because the pale gray turned absolutely black. It’s a better pot than if it had come out as I intended.

Peter Voulkos

Revolutions of the Wheel “Peter Voulkos and the Otis Group”, 1997 (time 7:12 to 7:54)

Peter Voulkos, who revolutionized the field of ceramics, also had a great many students who continued on to shape the field. They are termed “The Otis Group”. In the below segment of a film, Voulkos explains his pedagogical methods for teaching ceramic color.

We had three different types of glazes that were the dumbest glazes you ever saw or could think of. One was a shiny glaze one was a matte glaze and one was a semi matt and one was just black.

And I told my students this is all the glazes you’re gonna get. Now If you want those pretty glazes, you go down to the glaze store and get them but don’t bring them in here. You know, you got three dumb glazes, a barrel of this here and here, and your going to put it on these dumb forms and your Going to take that dumb shape whatever you got going there, and you got 3 or 4 dumb glazes there, and if you can make something aesthetic out of that your going to get an A.

Historical Application

A unique attribute of ceramic color is the ability to reference a specific time and place through the choice of color or combinations of colors. A potter can also reference place through the literal expression of color of local materials. Vessels are the medium of quotations and color can also apply to the use of cannons. While a jar may evoke images of columbian ritual vessels, a color combination of white, green and burnt orange might be referencing the Tang Dynasty in China. The writings on this topic not only pinpoint how an artist might consider the historical reference of their application but how history may inform ways to contextualize color to respond to the complexities of the present day. The historical application of ceramic color pinpoints another unique attribute of the medium. The color is applied to heteronomous objects, that is to say, objects that are intended to inhabit the larger world of people. Color in ceramic mustn't adhere to interior design dictations but effects of light and the movements of life are interactions that are taken into account. The intellectual complexities of color go beyond color theory applied to painting which can relate largely to autonomous objects. Color on ceramics relates to the continuum of all of human history and technological advancement.

Betty Woodman

Studio Potter VOL 35, NO.1, 2006 (pg 63-64)

Betty Woodman was a giant in the world of ceramics and beyond. She was the first living woman artist to have a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She was also an educator for 40 years. Below, she details the power of cobalt blue.

When asked what my favorite ceramic color was, without a moment’s hesitation I declared Blue. Now as I sit in my studio trying to write about this I look around and at first glance see absolutely no blue. Well, not quite no blue - but I see green, yellow, rust, a lot of orange, white, gray, and black. So why do I say with great certainty that blue is my favorite color? I think it is because of the universal historic importance of cobalt and blue in the development of glazed ceramic decoration. As soon as I pick up a brush and paint with some form of cobalt on a piece, I am putting it into the context of ceramic history, from china to persia to Holland, Portugal and Italy. As certainly as by making a vase the central element of my pieces, I am connecting them to all the vases or images of vases that have ever been made.

Philip Rawson

Ceramics, 1971 (pg 142)

Philip Rawson, gives the most extensive ceramic color theory overview that I have uncovered. Here, a small section on his insight into ceramic greens is revelatory for the implications of color’s presence in our world of objects.

Green, unless it is bright and yellowish or strident, is always felt to be a neutral, unassertive colour, not stimulation, even banal, a characteristic also of old summer foliage. Some people (Goethe among them) regard it as a restful and satisfying union of the characteristic of blue and yellow. In Islam it is the central colour, symbolic of the spiritual. A turquoise blue of green may suggest a watery coolness which makes it especially grateful to peoples, like those of eastern Islam, who live in a burnt and desiccated land. They, certainly, are the cultures who have used it most on their pottery- interestingly enough as an overall colour, not as a design-painting medium. Such colours occur naturally in the old glass made in these regions. The Persians have used them very extensively as a leading color in the ceramic tiles with which they clad the surfaces of parts of their mosque. In its brightest, purest form this turquoise colour is allied with

a complementary image of the most fiery golden orange. Of course when it is used as an overall colour, not as a design-colour, it cannot project this complementary image upon itself, but it may itself seem to stand out as the exact contrary to the ‘hottest’ colour in the scale; this is why it may seem gratefully ‘cool’ in a torrid climate, as the strong and precise symbolic opposite of the tone of its surroundings.

Edmund De Waal

The White Road, 2015 (Pg 77)

Edmund De Waal is a British author, educator, and artist who has a specific interest in porcelain and the history of ceramics as a whole. Here he laments the lack of prose that poeticizes the beauty of white porcelain and glaze.

This porcelain is as ‘blue as the sky, bright as a mirror, thin as paper, and resonant as a musical stone’. And 200 years later: this is like jade. And ‘ this Kuan porcelain is generally classified as about equal to Ko porcelain. The light green colour is considered the best, the white ranked next, the ash-grey lowest. With regard to the crackling, that with line like broken ice of the colour of eel’s blood is put first, that like plum-blossom petals stained with ink next, fine irregular broken lines last.’ The glaze of this one is ‘marked with crab’s claw lines. The best is white in colour and bright in lustre; the inferior, yellow and coarsely worked. None of it is worth much money.’ And another 200 years later: these porcelains, says the Tao Shu, included pieces decorated with vermilion red, with bright onion green, “vulgarly called parrot green, and with aubergine purple. The three colours, rouge-like red, fresh onion-like bright green, and ink-like purple, when of uniformly pure colour with no stains, comprise the first class. They have inscribed underneath the numerals I, 2 &c., to record the number of the pieces’.

The connoisseurs sniff, categorise, rank, price, demote.

Celadons, the colour caught between green and blue, get sky after rain, and kingfishers, and iced water, all of which are lyrical. A Tang Dynasty poem compares a service of teacups for the emperor to “bright moons cunningly carved and dyed with spring water / Like curling disk of thinnest ice, filled with green clouds / Like ancient moss-eaten bronze mirror lying upon the mat / Like tender lotus leaves full of dewdrops floating on the riverside!’

You feel the poet has only just started his evening and that there are more smiles ahead.

What can you compare white porcelain to? “The best is white in colour and thin as paper. It is inferior to Ju porcelain and the value comparatively less’ Or it can be as thin as silver. As white as driven snow. Or milk.

It is not much to go on. I want poems that compare white porcelain to smoke coiling up from a chimney, or from incense on an alter, or mist from a valley, or, at the very least, an egret in a paddy field, poised. But the main trope on white porcelains that I can find is they are ‘as white as congealed mutton fat’.

George Woodman

Studio Potter VOL 14, NO.2, “The Problem of Color in Ceramics” 1986 (pg 18-19)

George Woodman was a painter associated with the pattern and decoration movement in the mid 1970s. He was also the husband of ceramicist Betty Woodman which makes his remarks about the situation of ceramic color distinctive. His intimate knowledge of both ceramics and painting allows him to pinpoint the some of unique attributes of ceramic color.

Not only is it unwise to forget that pots are colored things, but also to ignore their tradition as functional things. Behind our repulsion at being served a rare steak on a bright red platter lies a

whole pattern of associations and expectations of color in the objects of use. In addition to the matter of “appropriate” colors to contain various food substances there is the issue of objects having colors that we would or would not care to touch. Non-functional ceramics is not divorced from these factors either. Clay objects are remarkable in their power to invite, repel, or mystify and to seem probable or improbable in terms of color, surface, and material. It would be a mistake to regard the implications of function as a limitation on color in ceramics. At best it is seen as a fact, one of the reasons why ceramics is not a three-dimensional painting, but rather a part of the poetry of color in the world. Marble, soot, blood, honey, all evoke color as a pungent dimension of material. In the most beautiful ceramics color is amazingly variable in its associative qualities. “Realistic” color is Meissen figurines is sweetly comical for its evocation of the implements of dining and the colors of food. Majolica brings together colors suggestive of mineral, fabric, wood and brass. Certain japanese folk pieces bear the coloring of autumn days, smoke, damp fields, and vegetation. Can we look at dleft without sensing the scrubbed kitchen or the white lace so indispensable to the dutch portrait? Ceramic color is poetic only as its associations remain alive. When they are stale cliches, the referential dimension becomes burdensome. The ubiquitous brown jug and celadon vase at today’s craft fairs are often as trite as the granola bars and pseudo-Tiffany glass sold nearby because there is no fresh response to how we feel about color in things we touch and use. Everything in our reactions has been taken for granted. Stereotypes are insulting because our capacity for a complex response has been reduced to a conditioned reflex.

Inspirations and Influences

This section provides opinions on ceramic color from the whimsical of Val Cushing to the slightly cynical of Ron Nagle. It is here that the student of ceramic color may find the most inspirational spring boards for ways to frame ceramic color in their practice. All of the below authors wield color masterfully in total integration with their forms. Color is not a secondary concern, nor is it their primary focus. Insight into how they conceptualize color in their process offers opportunities in the reading of ceramic objects color.

Philip Rawson

Ceramics, 1971 (pg 135)

Philip Rawson, the ceramics philosophizer, gives his take on one of the foundational qualities of ceramic color which is the ability to be glossy.

It is in the middle range of gloss that the variations of expression of which glaze and colour jointly are capable become most interesting. Glaze depth undoubtedly intensifies the emotive value of a colour. A fine Imari orange enamel has a far more emphatic quality than the same iron orange when it appears in the biscuit body of a yi-hsing ware. A really deep glaze, however thick and unctuous as in Sung Lung-ch’uan and Chun, seems so to speak, to draw the attentions within its own translucent thickness. Its depth gives us a sense of the internal mutual reflections of its glaze particles with their different colours ; the eye is not forced to accept the outer surface as a coloured sheen. A similar effect, thought less pronounced, may be felt with underglaze or fully fused-in overglaze blue enamels. Even within the ground is relatively high glost. It is the special charm of many of the eighteenth-century European soft-paste glazes that they emphasize their colours neither too much nor too little. Since, in effect, colour symbolized feeling, most people have felt happier with that degree of glaze intensity which matches their

cultural attitudes. If, as has been suggested, matt conveys reserve, the feeling offered by colours may thus intensity along a scale of gloss emphasis ; at a certain point, related to technology and expense, it may then come to express an ambitious and even unacceptably in-human desire to overwhelm with grandeur.

Val Cushing

Studio Potter VOL 14, NO.2, “A Glaze History”, 1986 (pg 3)

Val Cushing was an artist, educator and author. The majority of his teaching career was spent at Alfred University. The Cushing Handbook has been a treasured resource for ceramic artists everywhere. This passage by Val communicates the magic of glaze.

Glazes are part of the magic of ceramics-an important part. The sparkle of reflected sunlight on the deep blues and turquoise of the mediterranean sea is an enticing image: nothing can capture or symbolize that kind of sensation as well as a glaze. Glazes can fill us with symbolic references and implication, connect us with nature and transfigure natural elements. The alkaline, copper-blue glaze can be read as a tropical lagoon, an open and limitless sky, an ice cavern, a fresh and delicate wildflower, or as the sea itself, and can give us a sense of depth, or looking into as well as looking at something. The ceramist controls the metaphor. Glazes have wonderful inherent qualities. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination of the artist. Imagination is given vivid reality when we touch and hold a glaze in our hands.

Richard Devore

Studio Potter VOL 14, NO.2, “Potters on Color”, 1986 (pg 55)

Richard Devore was an American studio potter and educator. His vessel forms of organic and stone like qualities are widely collected. Below, Devore describes the inseparable nature of ceramic color and surface texture.

I use tints, tones, and shades with low intensity or saturation. The successive translucent matt layers modify each hue in order to create depth and frequently to establish an ambiguous reading off color associations. Texture is inseparable from color. The surface has a worn quality, which suggest both a spatial distance (into the surface itself) and a temporal distance (the object in relationship to time). This softens the space-breaking edge and space-displacing presence of the shape, allowing other elements to be more asserted visually. With the lighter value pieces in particular, this faded/worn quality adds a tentative touch relationship to the supporting plane. (Of course, the shape itself is an equal participant.) I want a soft, smooth, dry, and distant quality that can conjure the viewer an awareness of the opposite, that is, rough, wet and immediate (sometimes referred to as simultaneous contrast.)

Betty Woodman

Theatre of the Domestic, “In Conversation with Betty Woodman.”, 2016 (pg 65)

Betty Woodman, a true ceramic colorist, describes some of her inspirations and sources for her color palettes in this conversation with Katharine Stout. Her permissive attitude towards borrowing color palettes is refreshing.

B. W. Fra Angelico’s Room is unusual. Fra Angelico was an amazing colorist, and I took all the colors from one of his paintings I saw in Florence for my own work. I have done this often. For example I was interested in the works of Paul Gauguin, in the palette of his paintings. I’ve done this for years with my ceramic pieces as well, so when thinking about colors I might start by looking at a painting and writing down the specific colors that were used and limiting my own painting to the same colors.

K. S. You are an amazing colorist. You’ve mentioned that it’s not something you think about, but your experimental and exuberant use of color is striking.

B. W. I haven’t thought of myself that way, but having just visited the historic ceramics collections at the victoria and Albert Museum from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, I’ve realized that it’s all pretty monochrome, pretty brown. As an artist you need to be asking, “what are you doing that hasn’t been done before?” My Work has grown out of pottery, but certainly I’ve even aware of all the art forms that use painted forms. There isn’t a lot of sculpture that uses color, though of course sculpture is defined as a very different thing today than it was thirty years ago. However, even if sculpture uses color, yes it makes it red, but it doesn’t really play with the color.

K. S. This reflects your appreciation of painting as a discipline and as a historic medium, but also your enjoyment of it.

B. W. It was interesting to visit the Frank Auerbach show at Tate Britain, as he starts by copying the Rembrandt, and it’s almost as if Rembrandt gives him permission to start experimenting with yellow in his later works. Color in ceramics is quite unique, as the glazes don't change, so you see them as originally intended. I obviously have knowledge and love of ceramics, so i haven’t wanted to give that up. On the other hand, I’m interested in doing and learning new things. So in a way, just as everyone is jumping on the ceramic bandwagon, i’m sort of moving away from it. Or, rather, not leaving it alone, but having it not be the total picture.

Ron Nagle

Studio Potter VOL 14, NO.2, “Potters on Color”, 1986 (pg 54)

Ron Nagle is an American ceramicist, musician and songwriter. His small scale sculptures are known for their vibrant and rich use of color. Nagle gives some insight into his thinking about color usage.

Where does color come from? Why do I choose certain colors for my pieces? The colors I like most are dark and subtle, the kind I refer to as my Rothko pre-suicide colors, those beautiful deep grays, maroons, and dark greens in the series of painting he made shortly before he died. Yet I often use bright colors, the type people think of as California colors. Certain colors don't fail me, and i tend to gravitate toward them. Pink is one, turquoise another - 50’s colors, basically mexican. They work; i don’t know why. I also like colors that walk the line between hues. Someone says, hey that's a nice bue. And I say, Naw, that’s green. Or if orange, I say red. They are colors you can’t quite put your finger on. Years ago i saw the work of the painter Giorgio Morandi. His still lifes had a quiet, transcendental quality, a stylistic elegance, and a formal strength. His colors were like no one i’d ever seen - pastel without being pasty, rich without being bright, amazingly subtle. I can see them now. I first became interested in china-painting because my mother painted figurines. I said, Wow, all this stuff, and predictability, too! My idea was to minimize unpredictability in ceramics so when it came time to open the kiln, it wouldn't be like finding coal in your stocking on Christmas Day. Another influence was the process of automobile painting. When I was a kid, I was absolutely nuts about hot rods sprayed with lacquer paint. Twenty coats or more were sprayed with lacquer paint. This whole mentality lapped over into the way I approached china painting, and I used the air brush instead of the traditional brush technique.

When starting to work on a piece, I don't think, this will be blue or green: I just wing it. My sense of color is purely intuitive. I never did like color theory that says if you put this near that, you get the other. I look at Albers’ paintings, and many are boring; other are magic. I did have the good fortune once, to hear him lecture, and some of what he said stuck. Proportion is everything, he said. Certainly, optical effects will happen when two colors are put together, but what’s exciting is the effect of a new combination; colors you’ve never seen together give a sense of magic. Nobody ever used colors like Mrandi, or Rothko, or Whistler, or Sargent. Some people say a form demands a certain color . To me, it doesn't matter. Take Dick Tracy, a piece named because my wife thought it looked like Dick Tracy’s nose. I just mixed the blue with the right amount of white and got lucky. It may be that one of the biggest problems in ceramics relates to color and form, but I just make the piece and think about color later. My pieces go in and out of the kiln a whole bunch of times. First time out, I spray or paint it, then put it back in the kiln. Here’s some green. Maybe I’ll put pink on top of that. I fire it, look at it, and, wow, stop! Somehow I know when it’s done. Even though ceramic color is limited by process, our ceramics field is preoccupied with color in this decade. Fashion and trend have something to do with it. I think people just got tired of the gray and brown stoneware look the Voulkos ceramic revolution created, and turned to color. Now the trend may be changing. I’m getting interested in the stoneware look again. I'm starting to work in red clay, and keep my colors down to white, black, and red.

Janet Koplos

The Art of Toshiko Takaezu, “An Unsaid Quality…” 2010 (pg 28)

Janet Koplos is a distinguished scholar of craft, art, architecture, and design who has published over 2,500 articles since 1976. From 1990-2009 she was senior editor at Art in America magazine in New York City.

An Extraordinary electric blue that is now associated with Takaezu’s work became prominent at the beginning of the 1970’s, when she poured dazzling caps on closed forms. But the cobalt hue had attracted attention as early as 1959. As she adopted more vivid colors, an intense pink appeared as well. They seem quite surprising after the muted palette of her earlier work. Yet she returned regularly to Hawai’i, where such colors would seem less extraordinary - occurring as they do in the ocean, the tropical fish, shells and flowers on the island as well as in human artifacts depicting those, such as apparel. One writer reacted to “Makaha” a glazed blue-and-gold porcelain bowl of moderate dimensions hung from a wall:

“Oh, that blue-it is unbelievably seductive. But then, so is the gold. Metallic and matte at the same time, it is a gold Correggio might have chosen for his Jupiter and Lo. I remind myslef that I am talking about a bowl….It is a pot. It is a painting….there is a sensuousness about her use of color ... that catches the breath. She has a way of taking a color, brushing it softly across a surface, tipping it up suddenly and letting it slide crosswise, then stopping it just short of an unexpected rest….The Sense of Dynamics in Takaezu”s painting has something musical about it, as if glazes were to turn into melodies and silences. But there is wit too. She does a classy turn with contrast, Breaking into a streak of metallic clay, for instance, with an infinitesimal point of white.” (Elizabeth Breckenridge).

Jack Troy

Studio Potter VOL 35, NO.1, “Defining Color”, 2006 (pg 77)

Jack Troy is a well known American wood fire potter and educator of over 40 years. He has also authored publications enlarging understanding in the ceramics field. This passage from Jack is a bit of technical poetry.

Every potter’s Christmas stocking should at some point contain a Coddington magnifier for the same reason that bird-watchers use binoculars: until we see ceramic surfaces or migrating hawks

through magnification, we can’t imagine how much we’re missing, whether it's the countless light-diffracting bubbles in a chun glaze or the square tail of a sharp-shinned hawk distinguished from the rounded one of a Cooper’s hawk a quarter mile away. The colors of natural-ash glazed ceramics can be inseparable from both visual and tactile textures, and may need to be touched to be fully experienced. For example, a certain fluid emerald-green appear ephemeral when viewed from different angles, the color-source seeming to disappear or hang suspended on its transparent medium. Sometimes, the dark gray or black matte surfaces reflect light from tiny diamond-like crystals revealed only when the angle of observation and intensity of illumination change. Some pieces document the kinetic passage of fluid ash glaze from opaque to transparent as heavier microparticles streak, smear, or settle out over many hours during the “heat-work” phase of a firing. If all that reads as if it had been written by someone in a white lab coat, try to imagine “Magic Science” embroidered on the pocket, above chain-oil stains that came from running a Stihl MS 361 saw.

Kirk Mangus

Studio Potter VOL 35, NO.1, “Why Red?”, 2006 (pg 74)

Kirk Mangus was a ceramicist and educator as the head of ceramics at Kent State for over 30 years. His playful and colorful vessels and sculptures are widely collected. His poem reflecting on the choice of red encapsulates all that makes ceramic color unique and challenging.

Why red? Why not? I went with red because it was good luck. Is copper an element? It can change. So can we. We reduce ourselves. We also expand our elemental experiences. Red makes sense. The Romans and Chinese were right: Power and control should be bathed in the generous hue of red. Why not? Should we try to understand this? The materials are a mystery. They need to be examined again and again. Science is art. Art is useful.

Conclusion

Kirk mangus offers a fine conclusion to this selection of text on ceramic color theories but here is a handsome little bookend. Themes emerging from the texts are critical to pedagogical praxis of American studio pottery today.

Connections are made between ceramic color and nature either by the use of the raw material or how the color reports to the senses. Color can relate to truth or artificiality and is especially pertinent in older text in which the effects of industrialization posed a threat to the supposed natural order of things.

It is clear that ceramicists are concerned with the history of the medium and how color can place an object within a discourse of a specific place or time. This points to who the audience was for 20th century American studio pottery. The assumption is that the audience will be educated in the history of global pottery trends to the extent that a specific color combination will reference this knowledge.

The unpredictability of color in ceramics has lead to two opposing ramifications. A pedagogical approach to understanding the materials chemically (in addition to physically), and acceptance of some kind of higher power or improvisation which guides success. No matter how far the technical understanding of ceramic color mediums in ceramics progresses, an element of mystery will always remain in the concept of transformation.

This examination of color attitudes and can lend some understanding to the way that color is handled in an academic setting today. However, the collection is not intended to come to a conclusion but rather offer a jumping off point for students of the marvelous functions of ceramic color and it expressive power beyond the afterthought.

Sources

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Batchelor, David. 2000. chromophobia. Illustrat ed. London: Reaktion.

Berensohn, Paulus. Finding Ones Way with Clay, Pinched Pottery and the Color of Clay. New York, NY: Bezanson, Brother Thomas. “Potters on Color.” Studio Potter 14, NO.2 (June, 1986).

Cardew, Michael. Michael Cardew: A Collection of Essays. Crafts Advisory Committee, 1976.

Cushing, Val. “A Glaze History.” Studio Potter 14, NO.2 (June, 1986).

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Koplos, Janet. “ ‘An Unsaid Quality…’ ” in The Art of Toshiko Takaezu, edited by Peter Held. New York: The Toshiko Takaezu Book Foundation, 2010. Leach, Bernard. A Potter’s Book. London: Faber, 1940.

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