Looking for a suitable bowl to stand my ginger beer plant in yesterday afternoon, I remembered these bowls that I threw on the wheel at Batley School of Art in 1969 and I brought them down from the attic.
These were the rejects; somewhere I’ve got one bowl which was slightly more successful but my ultimate ambition had been to make a teapot. Mr MacAdam, our ceramics tutor, talked me through the process, which involved throwing a spout separately and attaching that with slip (watered-down clay) to the teapot. He was keen that the handle should appear to grow naturally from the pot.
Unfortunately I never got that far. Several, if not all of these bowls, were originally intended to be teapots but they wobbled on the wheel and, in order to salvage something from my efforts, I cut them down and repurposed them.
I had some limited success with mugs. You can drink from them, but my idea of randomly blotching them with manganese powder didn’t work: they just look as if someone with blue powder paint on their hands has picked them up.
But I do like the glaze on these bowls, I just wish that I’d used the same glaze on the mugs. Mr MacAdam keep a grey, A4 hardback, which he referred to as his ‘Dirty Book’, to keep a record of recipes for glazes that he tried. He claimed that he could always tell which students had done life drawing by the shapes of the pots they threw on the wheel.
I treasured a demonstration mug which Mac made to demonstrate the process. There were subtle features, like a sharper edge on the inside of the rim to prevent tea dribbling down the outside of the mug. I used the mug right through college but sadly it got broken decades ago.
I remember ‘Mac’… Some of the more devious students would get him talking about
Bob Dylan as he was a huge fan…this seemed to kill a bit of time as Pottery wasn’t for everyone. He was a lovely bloke. Do you remember Mr.Bartle who was the Exhibition
Design bloke…strange…but interesting and talented. Nev’ Smith, another legend!
‘Heironymous’ (as he once dubbed himself) Bartle could tell some great stories. I thought about him when I finally got to visit the Vatican Museums in February. He and a couple of his wartime army buddies had come across an underground structure which contained dozens of intact examples of what he said was Roman glassware. They carefully wrapped up a few of them in their backpacks, when they got to Rome, donated them to the Vatican Museums. I wonder if they are still in the collection with his name as the donor on the record card. In my memory of the story, they came across them in North Africa, in the desert perhaps, but I might be mistaken.
I caught up with Nev Smith at Trent Poly when I taught a few drawing on location sessions with the textile students in 1975. He was in the fine art department.
Looking through my address book, I found a number for Jean the model. She’s the only member of the staff who, all being well, is still around. I’m tempted to phone her!