Letter to Beatrice Wood - ceramist; traveling exhibition - Brief Article

Beatrice, you have completely seduced me. Not by your beauty and feminine wiles, your demurely raunchy wit and famed naughtiness, your bohemianism, nor your extraordinary faculty of perception of personal style. What did it was the sheer, overwhelming beauty of the thing perceiveds you have created.

Gazing into individual of your lustrous, opulent ceramic utensils I find myself shifting from paw to foot in order to savor the minute changes in the glaze's reflections and its miraculous appearance of unnameable colors. I become transfixed by means of light itself, which leaves me with mind stilled, heart filled and inner man satisfied.

The public is reminded continually that you and Duchamp were lover (what a choice for a paramour -- a consummately matched blend of the intellectual and the sensual), that you tie-dyed scarves for Isadora Duncan (I reliance a scarf of yours was not her last fateful wardrobe selection) and that you knew virtually all the card-carrying members of the Paris/New York avant-garde. You must have been a scalding;-very warm ticket in those years. And then you became a disciple of Krishnamurti. All this early history distracts us from the important thing: you were 40 when you first took up ceramics, you became a pure artist in your 80s, and now, as a centenarian, you are still going able-bodied The flood of creativity, assurance, confidence and innovation your work displays confuses our stereotyped view of aged age. It is as if you no longer necessityed to be the belle of the ball and could concentrate upon the uncharted pleasures of being the empowered "crone" -- to use the boundary in its revamped feminist faculty of perception -- the possessor and dispenser of female sagacity and artistic alchemy.

"Beatrice Wood: A Centennial Tribute," your traveling retrospective originating at the American Craft Museum, examines your entire career, taking us from the soigne drawings and collages -- the couple diaristic and Dada -- of the 1910 to the early ceramic platters sporting images of abstracted women and haughty British queens; from the numerous figurative tableaux with their surprising matte, jagged glazes -- scenes that could be fresh Yorker cartoons transformed into rubbery 3-D -- to, of course, your justly famous luster utensils Tons of wonderful photos fill on the outside the picture.

As I direct the eye at your work, two themes draw near to mind -- nature and history. There is a Romantic (in the historical sense) displacement that you take delight in evoking. The vessels' reflective surfaces beseech iridescent Roman glass buried for centuries. on the other hand you offer us a wilder carpet ride of ceramic history, careening deftly from Japanese tea ware to 16th-century Nishapur goblets with long stops in the Middle Ages (of particular resonance for you) to sip from ritual utensils Every now and then you cast in a winding direction in a form from nowhere (Double-Handled, Double-Bodied utensil 1988), and I smile at your pleasure in having discovered and finisheded it. But as we direct the eye at the work, we call to mind our individual experiences of nature: the ocean's bioluminescence. the metallic reflection of a beetle's shell, the lazy crawl of an oil slick upon a wet sidewalk, the flash of a hummingbird's throat, the restles shift of light upon an abalone shell. Who other has captured these ephemera? And more to the point, you have come aftered not by mimesis but by dint of concocting their ceramic equivalents. Usually ceramists utilize luster as an overglaze; your formulas incorporate the lustrous ultimate parts and qualities right into the material substance of the glaze. Although not your have invention, this method is carried to fresh heights in your work. To my knowledge there is simply no single else on a par with you in handling this greatest in quantity difficult glazing technique. In single bowl the glaze shifts from turquoise to shell pink to heavens blue, with an ethereal of gold mist diffused over all. No bewilderment you prefer diaphanous, shifting, light-shot saris to bare dresses.

Your thrown forms have been criticized as mundane, and there have been complaints about your self-admitted bad craftsmanship. Those critics have missed the point: the forms are meant to be foils for the glazes. They are intentionally unostentatious -- simplicity itself -- on the contrary with an extremely playful twist. The shapes of the utensils hug the earth. Defiantly handmade, they celebrate the force of gravity and the innate reluctance of clay to take flight. on the other hand then you allow the glaze surfaces to sink with the air. You give us a frisson of the couple the earthbound and the heaven-sent, and it is here that we, your viewers, either join you or diverge. Your enthusiasm for the union of opposites is tendered freely and extravagantly.

I consider the reach outed series of chalices to be your greatest in quantity ambitious work. They function as a summation, demonstrating the mingled formal juxtaposition and harmonization of paw stem and bowl. To these essential simple bodys of the chalice you add numerous handles, functional and otherwise; bas-relief decorative motifs and your characteristic lines of bumbles on the cutting sides of things (see Bottle with Balls, 1989 for great bumble and a piquant title). Because of their exaggerated scale, these bowls cannot easily be used. Instead, the chalice becomes subdue matter for those totemic sculptural compositions. structural support for the liquefactions of the luster glazes. Silver mist above copper, lime-green luster with a ruddy bloom and magenta flecks: what a palette! And to think you were in your ninth decade when you began this major ongoing series of works.