Stamping out pottery
Jul. 20th, 2020 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
offcntrEvery now and then, someone will pick up one of my pots, look at the bottom, and ask where my signature is. I point them to the little stamp mark on the side, down near the bottom.
Why don't I sign my work? There are several answers, all equally true.
1. I already spend a lot of time (sort of? I paint fast.) painting the top side of the pot. Don't want to spend more painting on the bottom, where nobody's going to see it anyway.
2. It feels egotistical? Like, art gets signed; this is craft. (I sign and date my sculptures, in fact.)
3. Minnesota Potters use stamps.
The last is probably the primary reason. Minnesota potters draw on the Leach/Hamada tradition, by way of Warren MacKenzie, who taught for many years at the University of Minnesota, and apprenticed under Leach at St. Ives Pottery. Japanese potters traditionally signed their work--when they signed it at all--with a chop, or stamp. Hence, so did Leach, and MacKenzie, and by extension, all of us pot-descendants.
I'm technically a Wisconsin potter, but both of my undergraduate instructors studied under Warren at UM. The first assignment we had, in our first class, was to make a stamp. (The second assignment was to go into the wood shop and make our own tools.)
One of my classmates did jewelry, and made a nifty stamp by soldering together wires of her initials, KS. I didn't have that skill, but I could bend a bit of wire into the stylized "f" I used in signing my cartoons on the campus newspaper. It looked a little lonely by itself, so I mounted it in a piece of round dowel, to make a two-part stamp.
That I'm still using, 40 years later.
Why don't I sign my work? There are several answers, all equally true.
1. I already spend a lot of time (sort of? I paint fast.) painting the top side of the pot. Don't want to spend more painting on the bottom, where nobody's going to see it anyway.
2. It feels egotistical? Like, art gets signed; this is craft. (I sign and date my sculptures, in fact.)
3. Minnesota Potters use stamps.
The last is probably the primary reason. Minnesota potters draw on the Leach/Hamada tradition, by way of Warren MacKenzie, who taught for many years at the University of Minnesota, and apprenticed under Leach at St. Ives Pottery. Japanese potters traditionally signed their work--when they signed it at all--with a chop, or stamp. Hence, so did Leach, and MacKenzie, and by extension, all of us pot-descendants.
I'm technically a Wisconsin potter, but both of my undergraduate instructors studied under Warren at UM. The first assignment we had, in our first class, was to make a stamp. (The second assignment was to go into the wood shop and make our own tools.)
One of my classmates did jewelry, and made a nifty stamp by soldering together wires of her initials, KS. I didn't have that skill, but I could bend a bit of wire into the stylized "f" I used in signing my cartoons on the campus newspaper. It looked a little lonely by itself, so I mounted it in a piece of round dowel, to make a two-part stamp.
That I'm still using, 40 years later.