Clay Pots and Color Spots is an intensive hands-on workshop focusing on the development of forms as well as learning how to produce layers and layers of decorative information. This class will create a tool box of inexpensive, readily available and low-tech methods of surface design meant to draw your audience in and reward them with bountiful color, shape and designs.
Students will need to bring:
Studio tools
X-acto knife
Soft yellow round sponge
Brushes
Documentary in which Ros Savill, former director and curator at the Wallace Collection, tells the story of some incredible and misunderstood objects – the opulent, intricate, gold-crested and often much-maligned Sevres porcelain of the 18th century.
Ros brings us up close to a personal choice of Sevres masterpieces in the Wallace Collection, viewing them in intricate and intimate detail. She engages us with the beauty and brilliance in the designs, revelling in what is now often viewed as unfashionably pretty or ostentatious. These objects represent the unbelievable skills of 18th-century France, as well as the desires and demands of an autocratic regime that was heading for revolution.
As valuable now as they were when first produced, Sevres’ intricacies and opulence speak of wealth, sophistication and prestige and have always been sought after by collectors eager to associate themselves with Sevres’ power. Often the whims and capricious demands of monumentally rich patrons were the catalysts for these beautiful and incredible artistic innovations.
The film explores the stories of some of history’s most outrageous patrons – Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, as well as their foreign counterparts like Catherine the Great, who willingly copied the French court’s capricious ways. Ros tells how the French Revolutionaries actually preserved and adapted the Sevres tradition to their new order, and how the English aristocracy collected these huge dinner services out of nostalgia for the ancient regime. In fact, they are still used by the British Royal Family today.
In this video, ceramist Angela Mellor discusses the process she uses to create her handbuilt bone china paperclay vessels.
Discover how Angela makes her work in the full step-by-step masterclass inside CR 298 (July/August 2019). You can order current and back issues of the magazine from ceramicreview.com.
