Heroes

I met a hero of mine yesterday. Someone I've long admired and known we have friends in common, but I actually got to shake his hand and talk to him. His name: Mark Hewitt. He made the absolutely beautiful pots above, the photo of which I shamelessly borrowed from his phenomenal website.

Mark (I hope I can call him this now) works in Pittsboro, NC and comes from a long line of industrial potters in England. He traveled and learned the craft of pottery before finding his way to North Carolina. You can read his whole story here.

I was so excited to see him, and definitely had to work to keep myself from gushing. Yet, as we talked, he was down-to-earth, friendly, and seemed almost as excited to talk to me as I was to talk to him. He genuinely is interested in encouraging others in the arts and helping them learn and grow. We met because I was volunteering at Craft in America's "Crafting a Nation" conference in Washington, DC, where he was on a discussion panel. He shared a lovely essay he wrote about why he has apprentices and why encouraging younger students is important. It made me contemplate giving up this masters degree to go work in clay with him for two years. His excitement for clay and training the next generation is contagious and made me admire him even more.

I highly recommend if you are in NC, or will be, to attend one of his kiln openings. Or, if you're in DC, visit his piece in the Luce Center. Or find a gallery or other collection that has his work in your area.

Meeting Mark reminded me why I love potters so much. They are often humble, friendly people who want to know about you almost more than they want to sell their pots. And because they take that time, it just makes you want to buy their work and support them even more. So today, go out and support your local potter.

Fool the Eye

Should you wonder why I've suddenly upped my blog writing in the last few weeks, it's because I'm simultaneously avoiding writing my thesis and helping myself write my thesis. I'm avoiding, well, because that's just what I do. But I'm helping because somehow, these posts get my brain in the right place to crank out 4,000 words or so about a man, an exhibition, and a country on the verge of being wowed by studio craft.

Fool the Eye is the literal translation of "trompe l'oeil." It's one of my favorite art techniques. I've always wanted to attempt it, but lack of skill and direction hindered it in the past. It's going on the list of things to do later in life.

Lest you think this post is about musing of no coherent nature, direct your eyes back to the top of the page. This is an amazing piece of trompe l'oeil. I discovered it in my roam through the Luce Center last week and was instantly struck by it. I noticed it must be a pretty recent acquisition as its accession number is 2009.45. It's all clay. The corrugated cardboard: clay. The books: clay. The wheels: clay. Amazing, isn't it?

Unfortunately, this piece, titled Bookmobile, is so new that the Luce Center site tells you that research is being done on this piece and you should return later to learn more. I dug a little to find out about the artist: Sylvia Hyman. She works in Nashville, TN, and her work is all trompe l'oeil. I could write more, but others have done a much better job as you can read here.

I'm very interested in the books featured in this piece. There are several clay books, including Bernard Leach's, a copy of The Cat in the Hat, Plato, and Julia Child's French Cooking. Sadly, the picture doesn't show you several of the other books, one of which I recall is about music. I'm excited to learn more about this piece and why she chose to include these works.

For now, though I'll just be mesmerized by her skill.

Photo Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum

My Plates

Yesterday, after what constitutes a marathon session of reading at the Library of Congress (for me, that's about 4 hours), I decided I need to to go to a museum and actually see objects rather than reading about them. After skimming furniture books, exhibition catalogs and reacquainting myself with Mark Del Vecchio's Postmodern Ceramics, I knew I needed to go to the Luce Center.

The Luce Center, located in the Reynolds Center (which also houses the entirety of SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery), is open storage for both fine art and craft. Honestly, I've spent very little time in the fine art section because that doesn't appeal to me on the same level. So, I wandered up to the third level to look for "my plates."

These aren't plates I made. These are the plates that pretty much changed my life and the whole trajectory of my graduate school career. I spent a semester learning about these plates, about their maker, Howard Kottler, and discovering the whole world of Postmodernism. I read Fredric Jameson--and for anyone who's ever read him, you understand exactly how hard that was. But that's beside the point.

These plates are clever. Incredibly so. Kottler takes porcelain blanks, like you would find at a production factory, and applies decals to them. When he originally began his work, he used both porcelain blanks and commercially available decals. (My favorite part is that this process is called decalcomania.) These particular plates, as you can see above, take Thomas Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" and do humorous, if not dark, things to him. The one above is probably one of my favorites called "The Ambitious Resident." The repetition of the carriage, which came from a standard catalog of decals is combined with the special-ordered Blue Boy decal. The boy is chopped up in perfect pieces, but his expression doesn't change and he doesn't seem phased at all by this change. He also isn't going anywhere. What are his ambitions if he has no horses and can't even seem to pull himself together to have his entire body at least in one carriage? Kottler's other pieces probe in the same ways. "Would Blue Boy" is probably my second favorite from the set, but I encourage you to check out the pieces for yourself.

Photo credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum