Bede Clarke TOUCH AND TONE

Transcription

1 Bede Clarke TOUCH AND TONE Glen R. Brown 1 38

2 2 1 Bowl, 6 in. (15 cm) in height, wheel-thrown and altered earthenware, Stephenson White and Black Slips, underglaze, Meyer s Clear Glaze, Forecast, 29 in. (74 cm) in length, handbuilt earthenware, Bede Clarke demonstrating during a workshop at the University of North Florida, Photo: Paul Karabinis. See recipes for Clarke s earthenware clay, Stephenson Slips, underglazes, and Meyer s Clear Glaze on page 68. A dry lakebed fractured into an erratic network of cracks; mineral stains meandering over stone exposed by the receding of glaciers; splashes of mud incised with insect trails as fine as the mark a hair might leave if it cut into the flesh on which it lightly falls: the surfaces of Bede Clarke s pots, wall pieces, and sculptures recall traces of process on the eternal face of nature. However, here and there among the ostensible evidence of time, chance, and other factors beyond human control emerge clear assertions of the will. Impressed crosses, right-angled notches, regular punctate patterns, loosely painted letters and numbers, and, most obviously, figures scratched into the clay like faint petroglyphs attest to the origins of the surfaces in an aesthetic sensibility that disperses color, lines, shapes, and textures like words in a poem, each played off others to raise recollections and evoke feeling. Clarke s works derive their essential character from this dispersion of both fortuitous and deliberately introduced formal elements rather than from the particular forms themselves. If they embody a signature style, it is one more easily intuited than explained, more readily felt than described. Clarke himself invokes the metaphor of music as the most effective means of getting at the heart of his practice. Notes are only the most basic and anonymous of elements; it remains to the musician to infuse them with persuasive emotional power through timbral modulation, expressive timing, and the like. The equivalent in the plastic arts is what Clarke refers to as touch: both the physical, tactile manipulation of form and, in a more abstract sense, the particular way in which that tactile manipulation is guided by the artist. The touch is equivalent to what I hear when Carlos Santana is playing guitar, Clarke asserts. I don t care if I ve never heard the song before. I know and love his sound. To me that s the tone of the artist. I can hear that in John Coltrane and in Billie Holiday s singing. It s at the top of my priority list. I wouldn t say that everything else is incidental, but in the touch is where I really live. Given the importance of this constant in his work, Clarke attaches little significance to distinctions between pottery and sculpture, especially those derived from the concept of utility. Though he began his career as a potter and can boast of having thrown his first vessels while still in his early teens, the idea that a bowl, cup, or pitcher should be considered primarily a tool is foreign to his aesthetics. For me pots are art, he explains. I m thinking about the same thing whether I m making pots, sculptures, or wall pieces. It might sound heretical for a potter to say, but when I m making these things I m not thinking about eating. I m thinking about poetics: the notions of expression, tone, feeling. If someone uses my pots that s fine, but my favorite place for them is on bookshelves. Though Clarke considers the vessel his aesthetic touchstone an apt choice of word by one who reflects on practice in terms of modulating touch he has had an episodic career when it comes to exploring ceramic forms. In the late 1990s, for example, he embarked on what would become a decade-long inquiry into the nature of sculpture. 3 39

3 4 5 4 Migration, 8 ft. (2.4 m) in height, handbuilt earthenware, slips, glaze, Pitcher, 7 in. (18 cm) in height, wheel-thrown and altered stoneware, Rhodes Crackle Slip, Malcolm Davis Red Shino glaze, fired in a wood kiln, For Rhodes Crackle Slip recipe, see page Originating in contemplation of the horizontal line and a conception of sculpture in terms of shape, the earliest pieces in the series consisted of glazed-earthenware abstract forms arranged on shelf-like slabs. Transitional in nature, some of the sculptural forms retained attributes of the vessel. I was still holding on to the pot, Clarke admits, but I was trying to put it into a context. Sculpture is so much about presentation. An engine block in a junkyard is just an engine block, but put it in a museum with a light on it and it s sculpture. So I was trying to control the presentation with the horizontal line, the environment, the context. The context created by the earliest of these exploratory sculptures is akin to the space of a gallery in miniature: an effect that Clarke attributes to his affinity for the intimacy of vessels as containers. At right angles to the bases, background slabs provide the visual equivalents of walls that curve forward to enclose and frame space. Within the confines of this embrace, biomorphic and quasi mechanical forms in warm terra-sigillata slip and bright blue and yellow glazes drip luxuriously, attesting through their liquid flowing and pooling to an interest in painting that dates back to Clarke s student days. The glazed pieces consequently could be described as pan-media in conception, if not in terms of actual materials. Painting, pottery, sculpture, and even (by virtue of a maquette-like nature) architecture all figure into these works as slightly different formats through which to exercise the orchestrating influence of touch. Clarke s conception of touch should not be so narrowly interpreted as to imply the pedantry of absolute control with nothing in the work left to chance. On the contrary, chance pervades his process of making as an indispensable impetus to form. In fact, an interest in chance led Clarke, early in his ten-year engagement with sculpture, to shift his materials and methods primarily to stoneware fired in a wood kiln. The flashing, the crusty accumulation of ash, and the gray and green drips descending in liquid unpredictability over faint orange surfaces convey a sense of randomness that might at first glance seem to evade the artist s touch, even make it superfluous. However, touch for Clarke is not reducible to tactile manipulation alone but rather is intimately related to the idea of the artist s tone: a distinct reflection of the particular aesthetic sensibility of the maker. Tone in this sense can be as much a consequence of selection from among fortuitous visual effects as from direct physical engagement with the medium. In a wood kiln, the varied consequences of flames and atmosphere for clay can, of course, be influenced to some degree by such factors as the curvature or texture of a surface. Clarke s choice of sculptural form is in this respect crucial to the resulting tone conveyed by the work. As his sculptures progressed in the late 1990s, certain shapes insinuated themselves into his compositions and were retained and perpetuated for their influence over expressive effects. Among these shapes, the most distinctive is suggestive of a boat with a raised prow. That form just appeared, Clarke recalls. At first I thought, I don t want to make boats, but then I began to see its possibilities. It seemed to me that there was something melancholy about it. It struck a minor chord. That chord resonates with particular feeling in the sculpture Requiem, which resembles a funereal barge conveying a still and pallid cargo through mysterious waters. In 2005 another key form entered Clarke s repertoire when, as a visiting artist at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, he took advantage of the shock of being in a new studio. With a broken kiln brick as inspiration and recalling his early interest in drawings and paintings, he began producing wedge-shaped sculptures with angular faces ideal

4 6 7 8 for carrying painterly effects of glaze, slips, and ash as well as impressed and incised marks. Like the Tachist canvases of Antoni Tàpies or Alberto Burri, the Wedges seem animated by an existential struggle to define the self by imparting intention to a somewhat resistant matter. In their combinations of serendipitous and controlled formal elements, they convey intimations of consciousness opening a space for itself amidst the density of nature. At the same time, like that natural density, they exert a gravitational effect over the viewer. I want my work to be like a sticky bun, Clarke asserts. It should hold your eye, trap you like an insect getting caught. At the top of many of the wedges, bowls, and pitchers you ll see a cleft. It slows your eye down instead of letting it speed across the horizontal line like it s on a race track. Recently, after a five-year return to focusing almost exclusively on wood-fired vessel forms, Clarke has redirected his efforts toward a series of large earthenware wall pieces: large enough, in fact, that he has found it helpful to employ an engine hoist retrofitted with forks to hold the slab-like bowls and slightly concave tablets as he works both fronts and backs. The bowls, which he likens to classic Mimbres pottery of New Mexico, are equally three-dimensional shapes and spaces for two-dimensional drawing and painting. For me, Clarke says, clay and paint are sister materials. They re both plastic media. The way oil paint moves on canvas is very close to the way that clay moves when it s wet, so I have this love of painting too. Indulging that love simultaneously with equal affinities for sculpture and vessels is, for Clarke, crucial to an aesthetic of tone rather than type: an art driven by touch and a sensibility that transcends specific forms as a fundamental aspect of its freedom to explore. It s what I mean when I talk about not caring if it s a sculpture or a pot or a painting, he explains. It s really why I m making the things. 9 6 Bottle, 8½ in. (22 cm) in height, wheel-thrown and altered stoneware, glaze, fired in a wood kiln, Wedge, 9 in. (23 cm) in length, handbuilt, wood-fired stoneware, A Window Opens There, 30 in. (76 cm) in height, wheel-thrown and altered earthenware, underglaze, glaze, fired in an electric kiln. 9 Jar, 15 in. (38 cm) in height, wheel-thrown and altered stoneware, fired in a wood kiln, For recipes for Kirk Mangus Wood Stoneware and a recipe for a Helmer/EPK Flashing Slip that works great in wood firings, see page 68. See Bede Clarke s clay, slip, and glaze recipes on page 68. To see more of his work, visit the author Glen R. Brown, a frequent contributor to Ceramics Monthly, is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. 41

5 PAIRING POTS AND DRAWINGS IN THE STUDIO WITH OLD FRIENDS Recently I have been bringing together two old friends in the studio: pots and drawing. Simple cups and bowls are providing a familiar foundation from which to challenge and explore surface, color, and line. Pots This work is formed from red earthenware. I like a bit of tooth to my clay so I add some sand and coarse fireclay. In the forming process I am focused on establishing the geometry (major planes and proportions) of the pots and trying to create a rhythm or gesture on top of that geometry (1). Pressing, pushing, and squeezing the wheel-thrown forms softens the pots, adding layers of touch and nuance. From the beginning I want to build layers of visual stickiness into the pots (2). Drawing These simple shapes seem to need a bit of help. In the past I have wood-fired shapes like these and under the spell of the wood kiln they can become something. I am always interested in finding ways to give the pots a new life in this case a life of color, line, and drawing. The exterior is painted with a black slip, allowed to dry, and then dipped in a white slip (3). Finger marks and areas of thick/thin slip contribute depth and touch to the surface. 1 2 For the drawing, I use an underglaze made from 3 4 parts Gerstley borate to 1 part Mason stain by volume (4). This recipe is more commonly used as an overglaze, but it works fine on leatherhard pots as well. Because there is no clay or opacifier added, the color is more intense than in a traditional underglaze or slip. There are two secrets to getting the line quality you want. One secret: get some liner brushes (long and thin) or script liner brushes (longer and thinner). They are designated as #1, #2, etc.; the lower the number, the smaller the brush. They honestly do half of the work when creating thin painted lines. The other secret is to just start. I usually trust it when I see a shape or line on the pot. I don t even need to know where I am going but just begin blocking in the composition, adding details until completion (5). I approach it as a dialog with the pot. It s like my mother s advice; you just make one decision, then another, then another. It will come out right. If that doesn t work, wipe the line out with water, or, cover it with more white slip, or, just wipe the whole thing off and start over. Black covers everything. It is a fun ride but it requires patience. Remember, you don t have to finish in one sitting. Try orienting yourself to the pot in a variety of ways: sitting, standing, working on a banding wheel, holding the pot in your lap. Good light, good music, and reading glasses (for the more mature) help immensely Forming a bowl, adding layers of touch and nuance from the beginning. 2 Trimmed bowl with major planes and proportions established. The surface opens itself to drawing. 3 Applying white slip over black slip to a leather-hard cup. 4 This is the painting station complete with slips, underglazes, and brushes. It s usually in a state of chaos. 5 Applying slips and all underpainting are done when the white slip coating has dried to the touch, and the clay is still leather hard. Photo: Paul Karabinis. 6 Finished bowl, fired to cone 03 with a very thin clear glaze over the surface decoration. 7 Detail of a finished, fired bowl showing the glaze work. For clay, slip, underglaze, and glaze recipes, see page