caveat: the following train of thought happened entirely after the fact. The plate shown here resulted purely from a confluence of design ideas, time constraints, and physical limitations. Thus it ever was for the potter…
If an efficient way to destroy a culture is to destroy it’s language (or simply kill off it’s population), then a good way to honor a culture is to learn it’s language (and leave the people be) – likewise for a culture’s artistic heritage. But a culture’s visual language can take on a curious life of its own while traveling through the ages.
So, let’s talk delft. Delft is a creole ceramic expression. What began in the Arabian peninsula as a blue decorated tin-glazed response to white Chinese porcelain traveled back to China and then sprayed out in various forms, blanketing the globe. Each stop along the way sprouted whole new styles of expression (like delftware), even as local potters freely drew from what came before.
How cool it would be to trace this language by following a single image or decorative device along it’s entire historical arc! By seeing that image express change and/or constancy in the hands of an Arabian, Chinese, Indian, Yemeni, Persian, East and North African, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, English, Irish, or Mexican potter. Maybe curators, collectors, or scholars could identify such an image. I can’t. The big picture is too sprawling.
I’ll have to do like the old potters did and make my own ‘little picture.’ This one begins with a collision of two motives – to paint a fish (thus joining the ranks of fish-painting potters), and to wrap my head around an ‘Italianate’ delftware border pattern – combined with a diminishing inventory of blank plates as the clock ran out before a show.
Floating in the background were a 12th century Yuan Dynasty export porcelain bowl intended for the Indian Ocean trade, an early Dutch plate possibly made by an immigrant Italian faience potter, an obsession with Southwark floral imagery that creeps into every unguarded corner when I decorate, my brush and stick learning curve, a vague possibility that I may be related to early Delft potters, and a healthy dose of repetitive muscle strain.
Can one respectfully interpret the range, spirit, and boundaries of a historical style while still telling a unique story? Who knows? On the other hand nothing the potter makes exists within, or comes from, a vacuum.
The tale I offer goes something like this: “Here’s me wandering along in the language of pottery history.”
This Day in Pottery History 