Christmas Show, 4th&5th December

Following an astonishingly successful Open Studio event as part of Herefordshire Art Week (by special dispensation us near-border artists are sometimes allowed to join our English neighbours), we are opening again for one weekend before Christmas. Julienne and I have both been very busy on new work. She is now mounting, framing and hanging and, at the time of writing, I am firing a bisque kiln to be followed by a glaze firing in each of the kilns. It is going to be a tight schedule, particularly as I am also taking part in a group show at the Judge’s Lodging in Presteigne, 19th-21st and 26th-28th November. I believe I will be in the same atmospheric wine cellar at the Lodging as I was for last year’s show

Last year. The Judge’s cider jars rather dwarf my best efforts!

Richard Batterham

Richard Batterham was, for me, the defining figure of post-war stoneware pottery. His pots were certainly better known than the man, who didn’t do group shows, nor even that many one-man exhibitions, wasn’t keen on interviews and magazine articles, had only the tiniest handful of apprentice potters (just Thiébault Chagué and his own son, Reuben?), and turned down all invitations to teach (except rowing, at his old school, Bryanston, approached from the end of the lane where he lived and worked). His reputation as curmudgeonly didn’t fit my experience of him. He and Dinah were always welcoming, and their lifestyle seemed to be one to which most “food and drink” potters aspire.

His majestic bottle vases are not strictly “food and drink”, and the huge versions of his “standard” forms (made often, for the USA) would be difficult to actually use. Conversely his smaller and absolutely useful pots – cut sided bowls, lidded jars, “supper plates”, tea pots - have a dignity and nobility that makes them as one with the bigger work.

As I say, he didn’t teach students directly, but he probably had more pupils indebted to him than any potter since Leach and Cardew. Mike Dodd, Jim Malone and Phil Rogers have all acknowledged the inspiration they took from his work, and he, in turn, was pleased that they were working to principles that were central to his notion of pottery and that they might be an example to others.

With Phil Rogers going (much too soon) just before Christmas and now John Leach and Richard Batterham, after long careers, within a week of each other, pottery has lost three of its most formidable figures.

Richard with caddies, bottles and my sister-in-law.

A good friend and a great potter

Phil Rogers was a near neighbour. Very soon after we bought our place in Radnorshire we drove the fifteen miles to Rhayader and met him and Lynne, hit it off, and invited them for lunch the next day. I hadn’t much to show as a potter, other than the stuff we were eating off, my wheels and bench in the old dairy, a pile of bricks in the pole barn and some drawings for a kiln. Phil cast his eye over these and suggested significant simplifications - a good thing; I’d probably still be building the three chamber one today!

I’d known Phil’s work since very soon after I’d started potting. We’d followed the same route of fine art at art college, then teaching. That was when I had to learn to pot. I believe he’d been enthused shortly before he went into a classroom. He stuck with teaching for five years, I for thirty-five.

Our inspirations were pretty much the same - the “Leach School”, especially Richard Batterham, country pottery, pots in museums. We must also have been admiring the work of our contemporaries who were coming out of the studio pottery course run by Mick Casson at Harrow and whose work was being featured in “Ceramic Review”. Within a couple of years of my starting to pot, Phil himself joined the list of my inspirations.

He was very soon grouped with Mike Dodd and Jim Malone as the “Anglo-Oriental School”. While they were great admirers of Japanese and Korean pottery, I think they all felt the language they developed is sufficiently strong for us to stop stressing the role of an outside influence. Nonetheless the “yunomis”, “guinomis” and “chawans” are pretty much inconceivable without it and Phil Rogers’ standing in Japan (as also in the USA) is immense.

He was a fine teacher, as attested by those who came on his summer courses in the early days at Rhayader. He taught master classes abroad and his books are further evidence of a great communicator.

He could be famously grumpy, and didn’t do “small talk”. He liked to get things done and, although he played an important role on various forums over his career, he really didn’t think of himself as a “committee man”.

Articulate, honest and clear thinking, with a sure eye for quality and an assured sense of form, it was good to be around pots with him. He was also supportive at a personal level. We had cause to be grateful for his friendship and that of Lynne and Hajeong.

Lockdown Potting

2019 was a good year! I showed in “Craft in Focus” (Waterperry Gardens, Oxford), “Potfest in the Park (Cumbria), as well as “Ceramic Wales” (Wrexham) and, once again, “Pottery and Food’ (Wardlow Mires, Peak District). Having persuaded Julienne that we are still up to sleeping in a tent (unless we can borrow someone’s van), and that festivals like these are pretty much essential for reaching a wide audience of enthusiasts and collectors, I was all set to add “Art in Clay” (formerly Hatfield, now Windsor) and the CPA show in York for 2020. Then came Coronavirus. The shows bravely tried to find a way, but one by one they had to cancel or go “virtual” (no sales for me by that route). One went ahead - “Potfest in the Park”. Fewer potters, more spaced out, but almost as many visitors as usual, and higher sales. Some people seemed to have driven over four hours for their ceramic fix, and all were very grateful to the Cox family for sticking with it and to the potters for putting on such a show.

“Ceramic Wales” has decided to give 2021 a miss, but the others are crossing their fingers and taking applications. I see from correspondence that potters are building up stock and exploring new ideas, ready to burst back en masse. Let’s hope we can.

A New year

My web designer, Ben Garman, has successfully moved us to a new site. I’ve updated some of the text and begun on a new catalogue. Prices haven’t changed much, but other potters tell me this is generally true. It seems buyers are holding back a bit - uncertainty as a result of our imminent departure from the European Union?

One thing that didn’t move automatically with the site was the correspondence. Most of this wasn’t about pottery but about that shabby scam “Kids for Life” and its close relative the “National Crime Prevention Agency”. I saw on the news that another one, also hailing from the north west, had popped up, claiming perhaps to help refugees. The sheer length of my correspondence list (over two hundred) meant we rode high on the search engines and a good many people were saved from falling victims to Andrew Ager and his crew at Ducie Street. I think it may prove impossible to recover that correspondence, so if any previous correspondents find their way to this new site, let’s get it going again. Despite exposure by “You and Yours”, those guys are still at it.

I’ve just completed a big sort out of stock and a general bout of preparation for some serious work. I look forward to adding some stuff to the catalogue next month. (By the way, apologies that all my historic posts now bear the date 09.12.18. I’ll have to ask Ben if we can do something about that!).

Back in Action

I’ve not been away, but I’ve not been visiting, let alone updating, the site.  It has been a busy year throwing, firing, exhibiting, while handling ongoing situations which have nothing to do with the pottery.  However, a couple of people recently told me the site could not be accessed and I thought I’d better do something.  My web designer got it up and running again, but says I need to start again from a whole new platform, as I am dangerously out of date.  I’ll try to do this over the winter and in the meantime I’ll try to photograph some new work and post it.

I did Wardlow Mires again, which was very enjoyable.  I was too late in my application for just about every other big fair – either that, or else the fee to take part would have meant me selling just about every pot I’ve got!  Getting the balance between making and selling affordable “everyday pots” and doing stuff to sell in galleries at “art” prices is a tricky one, but I need to do both.

By the way, since the site was resurrected, almost every contact I’ve had through it has been in Chinese or Russian.  Do other websites get this?  Are these genuine enquiries for pots, or are they from women offering themselves to me as wives, or short-term companions?

Dinosaurs

In a recent article in Ceramic Review Sven Bayer, the “big potter”, a one time student of Michael Cardew, raised the possibility that he was a dinosaur, one of a dying species raised on a romantic notion of reviving and continuing a tradition of hand made pottery for use.

I’m sure there was an element of jokiness, but I was a tiny bit alarmed. Sven has been one of the handful of potters selling at David Mellor, a shop selling hand made kitchen and tableware alongside knives and forks, kettles and saucepans on the high street (OK, so it’s a posh high street off Sloane Square!). There is an online store too. Sven made pots in quantity, fired them in a vast wood-fired kiln which gave them the sort of flashed surfaces that some studio potters would feel warranted a plinth or a glass case and a three figure price tag. Sven asked no more for his work than you’d pay for decently designed factory made ware. Was he really now questioning that ideal?

Around the same time that article appeared I took part in Ceramic Wales at Glyndwr University, and listened to a talk by Alex McErlaine on the future of “Domestic Ware”. For a start Alex thought we should call it “Table Ware” and/or “Kitchen Ware”, to get away from the connotations of everyday drudgery in “domestic”. Preparing and cooking food and presenting it well has nothing in common with vacuuming, dusting or squirting coloured disinfectant into the lavatory.

Alex went on to give us a brief history of that branch of pottery in the 20th century and ended, with some optimism, with images of the work of younger potters at work today. I wasn’t entirely convinced that designing prototypes and farming out the making of the pots to the Far East (or Poland, or wherever the best deal could be had) really counted. However I could see that the pots of Fleen Doran and Sabine Nemet were in the “great tradition”, albeit on a smaller, more intimate scale than practiced at Winchcombe (Cardew, then Ray Finch) or at Muchelney (John Leach).

Then, a couple of weeks later, I went to the opening of “Richard Batterham: a Life in Pots” and my spirits soared. Working with a range of forms, established by the late ‘60s, and with only subtle variations and developments of these over the decades Batterham, now eighty, has made a wonderful body of work, entirely around the idea of useful pots. The CAA gallery, where the show was held, was full of beaming potters. Perhaps it was just my imagination that they rejoicing in the confirmation that they were doing something worthwhile. Sven Bayer was there.

Alan Caiger-Smith at Aberystwyth

It’s nearly a year since the big Aberystwyth ceramics festival, so it’s time I wrote something about it. The highlight for me was the talk by Alan Caiger-Smith which beautifully articulated the “meaning” of decoration, and described the mystery and excitement of rediscovering the art of lustre. Alan was an established potter when I began making pots in 1972, but the “in thing” at that point was stoneware, oriental glazes, salt and English country pottery. Alan C-G at the Aldermaston Pottery was embracing different traditions – earthenware, tin glaze, majolica and, relatively recently at that point, lustre. Young potters in the ‘50s, when Alan started potting, were looking towards the Mediterranean at least as much as the Far East for inspiration (and why not? – think of those joyous works by Picasso of that period, or of late Dufy, or of Brigitte Bardot), but for the young potters of the late sixties more rustic stoneware was somehow closer to the roots (like the blues compared with any music from the ‘50s).

I’d already thrown in my lot with the stoneware crowd, but I was teaching near Aldermaston and visiting the pottery quickly appreciated that it was firing with wood, that lustre was at least as much a venture into the unknown as salt glaze (much more so, really), and that pots whose shapes looked simple, almost bland, took on their true form only when decorated. I saw the model of a co-operative pottery workshop, consistent with the traditional rural pottery. It was pretty special then and, at this distance, Alan Caiger-Smith’s Aldermaston, which finally closed in 2006, seems an even more remarkable achievement. 

At Aberystwyth I bought Alan’s book, Pottery, People and Time, which I had somehow missed when it was first published in 1995. It’s a wonderful read – profound, humorous, generous and practical. My favourite chapters were probably the one in which he describes walking the old pony trail from St Ives to a tin mine (to learn more about this material essential for his glazes) and getting lost in mist and rain before eventually reaching a welcoming inn – “an altogether splendid day”, and Centering, a moving, philosophical meditation on throwing, which begins and ends with an account of Michael Cardew’s burial.

Pottery, People and Time by Alan Caiger-Smith, published by Richard Dennis, 1995.

KFL and NCPA: Are they perhaps related? We should be told!

(Apologies to anyone looking for news of my pottery; I’ll write that later). The Kids for Life scam goes on relentlessly, and now a couple of correspondents have drawn attention to the possible link between this and an almost identical scam run by the bogus National Crime Prevention Agency. Craig (see comments) came across a reference to KFL in the NCPA “magazine”, while another has found a Southport connection between both organisations. All this sleuthing should meet with the approval of NCPA (“Putting Crime out of Business”) in whose logo the letter C is a magnifying glass with a big fingerprint in the middle. Is this theft from Cluedo? Has anyone told John Waddington? Has anyone informed the National Crime Prevention Agency? It’s worth having a look at the scam forums relating to NCPA. While at it visit www.bookkeepers.org.uk/Forum/?type=&cid=0&tid=88210&lp…1… Your visit to the sites should ensure they stay on page 1 of the search engine. One correspondent who had wisely stopped answering the numerous calls for payment to KFL/Inpress Media from different numbers decided to trace them. The most recent was from a law firm with a “school of Inpress Media” type logo incorporating the Scales of Justice. I’ll not name the firm (two initials), but if they do contact you search the name of their lead (only?) solicitor and you’ll find him associated with a very dodgy customer indeed back in 2014/15. So don’t give way. Incidentally, in an early reply on my site I referred to a “bona-fide” Australian Kids for Life. That site, which had a very similar “heart” logo to our friends in the North West, and where photographs seemed to suggest celebrity backing, has disappeared. Maybe it wasn’t the real deal either. Is it the same as the “closed down” site in China referred to by Shaun in the comments below? Here are recommendations from the 50+ comments below for who to complain to: Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040 The Charities Commission (involves a form) Trading Standards The Police (especially if debt collectors are involved)