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The Potter and the Painter: a Dialogue
The Potter and the Painter: a Dialogue (pots by Barry Blight; paintings by Pamela Griffth)
Between 1961 and 1964, three young artists - Pamela Gittoes (later Griffith), Barry Blight and Peter Pinson - studied together at the National Art School and the Sydney Teachers’ College. In December, 2010, half a century later, their divergent careers came together again to develop a fascinating inter-relating exhibition of painting and pottery.
Pamela Griffith then set about establishing a formidable reputation as one of Sydney’s leading master printmakers, working with prominent artists to produce technically superb etchings and relief prints. At the same time, she maintained a personal exhibiting practice as a painter and etcher. She is a recipient of an Australian design award and has designed the waratahs that appear on the current Roads and Traffic Authority drivers’ licences, and also the toile fabric that was made for the Australian Bicentenary and the Beatification of Mary Mackillop. As well as designing the compact disc “Lonely George” cover for the jazz group Galapagos Duck, she collaborated with Don Harper to produce a CD, “Images of Australia” that went on to become the top selling jazz recording for the ABC in the Classics Section. She was commissioned by the Prime Ministers department to produce a limited edition etching that was presented to the Presidents of the 21 Nations represented at the APEC Conference 2007.
Meanwhile Barry Blight established a reputation for combining classic pot forms with surface decoration that was ornate and complex. Sometimes his surface decoration could be deliberately provocative in its relation to prevailing conceptions of “good taste”. For example, in a Potters’ Society exhibition in 1988, he ironically chose to reference his pots to the historical forms he most disliked - Baroque and Rococo ceramics - and to decorate them with bristling indigenous flora, combining over-the-top flamboyant Italian form with expressionist Australian imagery. Working within a circle of potters which tended to deride floral decoration, Blight set about challenging this convention by decorating his vessels with sharp and glorious banksias and sensuous garden flowers. He took this thematic provocation further, using motifs drawn from fruit (including lemons and oranges) and vegetables (ironically adopting such improbable subjects as artichokes, aubergines and radishes).
In the late 1990s, Griffith exhibited still life paintings at the Maunsell Wickes Gallery, Sydney. Each work used ceramics by the English art deco designer Clarice Cliff as subject matter. (Griffith has a few Cliff pieces in her own ceramics collection.) Some of her other still life paintings of this time featured pieces by distinguished potters including Ivan England and contemporaries as content.
As to the third member of this group, after retiring from the College of Fine Arts at The University of New South Wales, Peter Pinson established a gallery which specialised in exhibiting artists who established their reputations in the 1960s and 1970s. Developing the “art as the subject of art” angle of the Maunsell Wickes exhibition, he, Blight and Griffith conceived the notion of an exhibition of Blight’s pots, allied with paintings by Griffith of those very pots, which would establish a mutually-resonating dialogue between the two art forms.
Unlike his earlier works, in which forms were painted in slips or underglazes, Blight’s recent pots utilise scraffito and carving to define the motifs. It is a technique which captures the biting, almost dangerous edges of banksia leaves, and the subdued languorous rhythms of gum leaves. The celadon glazes tend to gather in the carved troughs, defining the edges of the plant forms. They are pots that bring together two traditions: the Southern Sung celadon tradition, and the lively pots of Merric Boyd, which found their inspiration is the bush around his Melbourne home. Blight, in turn, finds much of his inspiration in the wilderness area surrounding his country refuge in Kangaroo Valley.
Griffith’s still life paintings play with the paradox of everyday vessels, decorated with the spiky, aggressive forms of the Australian bush, located in the closed, measured spaces of domestic interiors. They are paintings that fall within the tradition of still life painting that derives from 17thC Holland, but her thematic use of Barry Blight pots positions the paintings firmly in contemporary Australia. They are spirited paintings, about spirited pots.
The Potter and the Painter: a Dialogue (pots by Barry Blight; paintings by Pamela Griffth) |
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