Dance Between Ceramics and Painting

A response to the thought-provoking issues raised in asking me to "write about my use of color in a painterly sense to enhance form."

I do not use color to enhance form. The painting I do - i.e. slip, glaze, colors, overglaze, etc. - is not subservient to a clay object. I try to coordinate a dance between ceramics and painting. This dance is the "object". I want to create. In other words, I use the form (clay) as a given and in the painting change the way in which it is perceived. It is some­what in the way a painter chooses a specific size of stretcher and canvas and then paints on it what he will, but more complicated because the form is partially at least three dimensional and then the spaces in between the parts are important also. What is "painterly"? Where does the term come from? George, my erudite friend, came up with this:

In about 1910 the Swiss Art Historian Heinrich Wolfflen coined the phrase, placing in pairs visual elements to show the dialectic of art history. Some of these pairs were:

linear - painterly

closed - open

classic - baroque

Painterly refers to a work of art where we are aware of the paint itself as an important part of what we experience. In my work I would come down on the side of the Baroque and Venetian. It is interesting to think about these contrasts:

Mondrian - de Kooning

Durer - Rembrandt

Palladio - Bernini

and in ceramics:

Sun - Oribe

Lucy Rie - Peter Voulkos

Adrian Saxe - Viola Frey