Seeing With Another Eye

05/01/2024

10:55

Page 1

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE

David Whiting is an independent writer and curator.

He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, and a trustee of the Anthony Shaw Collection.

Philip Sayer is a distinguished and versatile photographer whose work has included photojournalism, portraiture, interiors and architectural work.

The Anthony Shaw Collection is a trust which is still actively acquiring work. For a full list of artists included in the Collection and information on how you can support the work of the trust, please go to its website at www.anthonyshawcollection.org

THE ANTHONY SHAW COLLECTION

978 - 3 - 89790 -711- 9

9 783897 907119

ceramics sculpture painting

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE

AS_Jacket_final dimensions.qxp_Layout 1

This long awaited book celebrates the Anthony Shaw Collection, one of Britain’s most important private collections of studio ceramics, sculpture and painting.

Anthony Shaw (born 1951) began collecting in the early 1970s, initially focussing on studio pots, but expanding into more sculptural work by the following decade, with a particular emphasis on major artists such as Gillian Lowndes, Ewen Henderson, Gordon Baldwin, Sara Radstone and the highly versatile Bryan Illsley.

The Collection, now in trust, and originally shown in Anthony Shaw’s London home, is now exhibited as part of the Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA) at York Art Gallery.

In the present century it has been enriched by equally searching artists such as Nao Matsunaga and Kerry Jameson. They have brought their own remarkable imaginations to bear on a broad range of materials, not just clay.

This publication, with principal photography by Philip Sayer, surveys the full range of ceramics and sculptural objects and paintings acquired by Shaw, and provides a valuable insight into what has been a particularly fertile and enriching period in British art, as well as one man’s unique collecting vision.

front cover: Gordon Baldwin, Picasso Variation Blue II, 1984 Height 20 cm, earthenware back cover: Gillian Lowndes, Curling Loofah Collage, 1995 Width 33 cm, mixed media

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE

Text by David Whiting Photography by Philip Sayer

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE

Text by David Whiting Photography by Philip Sayer

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped with the making of this book. We would particularly like to thank our fellow trustee of the Collection, Tatjana Marsden, who has worked extremely hard on its making, as well as Peter Gladwin, who designed it. We are so grateful for their insight and expertise. We are very indebted to Philip Sayer, for his photography, and warm thanks are also due to our co-trustee Dr Janet Barnes for her practical and moral support. Thanks also to Christopher Jackson for his proofreading skills, and to our friends at arnoldsche, Dirk Allgaier and Julia Hohrein. We are much indebted to Professor Oliver Watson, who read and endorsed this book shortly before his untimely death. At York Museums Trust we would particularly like to acknowledge Dr Helen Walsh, Curator of Ceramics, for her help, and indeed all our colleagues at York Art Gallery and CoCA who have given the Collection its home for well over a decade now. Anthony Shaw would also like to put on record his gratitude for the guidance and friendship of the late Henry Rothschild, as well as the late Bill Ismay, and of course all the artists included in the Collection, most particularly those that are principally featured. We also wish to acknowledge the support and interest of our friend the late John Christian, the distinguished art historian and collector, to whom this book is dedicated.

Anthony Shaw and David Whiting

Contents

Published by The Anthony Shaw Collection and arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, 2024 © 2024 Anthony Shaw, David Whiting, Philip Sayer and arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or information storage and retrieval systems) without written permission from the copyright holders. www.arnoldsche.com Author David Whiting Graphic designer Peter Gladwin Photography Philip Sayer Additional photography by Dust jacket front cover, Page 8, top left, bottom left, 14, 15, 19, 208 and opposite, Anthony Shaw Page 4, Ian Davidson Page 39, 189, image left, Chris Streek/York Museums Trust Page 50, Ian Godfrey Estate Page 72, David Cripps Estate Page 152, Paul Iché Printed by GPS Group, Villach Paper Magno Volume 150 gsm Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available at www.dnb.de.

ISBN 978-3-89790-711-9 Made in Europe, 2024

front endpapers: Bryan Illsley, Partings and Pipelines, 2009 Solo exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery previous page, left: Final Selection at Billing Place, 2011 Selected by 30 friends

Foreword

Anthony Shaw

5

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE Anthony Shaw – Collector

David Whiting

7

ARTISTS I

Anthony Shaw and David Whiting

21

Gordon Baldwin

22

Owen Bullett

42

Ian Godfrey

50

Ewen Henderson

72

Bryan Illsley

102

Kerry Jameson

122

Gillian Lowndes

140

Nao Matsunaga

152

Sara Radstone

168

ARTISTS II

David Whiting

183

Selected Artists from the Collection

184

Remaining Artists in the Collection

207

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped with the making of this book. We would particularly like to thank our fellow trustee of the Collection, Tatjana Marsden, who has worked extremely hard on its making, as well as Peter Gladwin, who designed it. We are so grateful for their insight and expertise. We are very indebted to Philip Sayer, for his photography, and warm thanks are also due to our co-trustee Dr Janet Barnes for her practical and moral support. Thanks also to Christopher Jackson for his proofreading skills, and to our friends at arnoldsche, Dirk Allgaier and Julia Hohrein. We are much indebted to Professor Oliver Watson, who read and endorsed this book shortly before his untimely death. At York Museums Trust we would particularly like to acknowledge Dr Helen Walsh, Curator of Ceramics, for her help, and indeed all our colleagues at York Art Gallery and CoCA who have given the Collection its home for well over a decade now. Anthony Shaw would also like to put on record his gratitude for the guidance and friendship of the late Henry Rothschild, as well as the late Bill Ismay, and of course all the artists included in the Collection, most particularly those that are principally featured. We also wish to acknowledge the support and interest of our friend the late John Christian, the distinguished art historian and collector, to whom this book is dedicated.

Anthony Shaw and David Whiting

Contents

Published by The Anthony Shaw Collection and arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, 2024 © 2024 Anthony Shaw, David Whiting, Philip Sayer and arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or information storage and retrieval systems) without written permission from the copyright holders. www.arnoldsche.com Author David Whiting Graphic designer Peter Gladwin Photography Philip Sayer Additional photography by Dust jacket front cover, Page 8, top left, bottom left, 14, 15, 19, 208 and opposite, Anthony Shaw Page 4, Ian Davidson Page 39, 189, image left, Chris Streek/York Museums Trust Page 50, Ian Godfrey Estate Page 72, David Cripps Estate Page 152, Paul Iché Printed by GPS Group, Villach Paper Magno Volume 150 gsm Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available at www.dnb.de.

ISBN 978-3-89790-711-9 Made in Europe, 2024

front endpapers: Bryan Illsley, Partings and Pipelines, 2009 Solo exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery previous page, left: Final Selection at Billing Place, 2011 Selected by 30 friends

Foreword

Anthony Shaw

5

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE Anthony Shaw – Collector

David Whiting

7

ARTISTS I

Anthony Shaw and David Whiting

21

Gordon Baldwin

22

Owen Bullett

42

Ian Godfrey

50

Ewen Henderson

72

Bryan Illsley

102

Kerry Jameson

122

Gillian Lowndes

140

Nao Matsunaga

152

Sara Radstone

168

ARTISTS II

David Whiting

183

Selected Artists from the Collection

184

Remaining Artists in the Collection

207

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE Anthony Shaw – Collector domestic interior, but also objects that would enrich any museum collection. Eumorfopoulos principally bought early Oriental wares, but also contemporary studio pots by Charles and Nell Vyse (near-neighbours in Chelsea), for use about his house. Milner-White, a senior Anglican cleric, had a particular preference for the ‘fine art’ pots of William Staite Murray (who regarded his bowls and tall majestic vases as a form of sculpture), as well as individual pieces by Bernard Leach and his school. The American Henry Bergen was equally passionate about the burgeoning studio revival of English slipware, collecting it along with some stoneware. Significantly, their collections formed the corpus of early museum holdings too, with Milner-White’s going to York and Southampton, while Bergen’s is now held in Stoke-on-Trent’s Potteries Museum.

I am drawn to the very physicality of clay. I need to touch and be in the presence of the works I buy…what interests me is not how a work looks. The qualities I seek do not photograph well. We are becoming separated from the ‘real’ thing, and less able or concerned to understand the physical…I seek the ‘otherness’ of things, but they must have a human or animal spirit and defy being printable.

Anthony Shaw, 2017.

Anthony Shaw is a different kind of collector. It is not simply a ‘passion’. His acquisition particularly of ceramics (but also other related objects in two and three dimensions) has shown such a great commitment to the art of clay, a man for whom this most elemental and extraordinary of materials has been a constant allure. I think he is probably unique amongst his kind (‘a strange breed’, he wryly observes) because he lives and breathes it more than most. Anthony is someone who has been constantly ambitious for art that changes our perception, one that looks at a complex of unexpected landscapes. And that means the highest bar when it comes to his own dialogue with the visual and tactile, and with the artists and pieces which really excite him. It is because they extend his sensory perception, drawing on that mysterious quality that cannot be reproduced in words or photographs (as Braque once said, you can explain everything about a painting except the bit that matters). He has a self-possessed ability to recognise the real thing when he finds it, and then to put his all into supporting that artist and work. To say he inhabits this work is not to overstate matters, and he is more than a little stubborn in his beliefs.

In the early post-war years, the buying of studio pots in a more connoisseurial sense was growing slowly as the number of potters also increased. York Art Gallery recently benefited from the bequest of another important holding that had begun in this period, that of the W.A. Ismay Collection, in 2001. Ismay, a Wakefield librarian, began to purchase pots in 1955, initially those of Barbara Cass in York. The scale and rate of his buying were impressive and increasingly wide-ranging, with Ismay again principally interested in the functional, but with occasional purchasing that reflected the emerging interest in sculptural work and the growth of art college experimentation. By the end of his life Ismay had filled his small Wakefield home with some 3,600 pots, objects which covered every available surface. The crowding expressed personal obsession on a very large scale, and where his ownership was as much a reflection of Ismay’s varied friendships with potters as well as particular shops and galleries. He was also an important commentator, writing extensively on the subject. The sense of a collection being autobiographical in nature, revealing much about its owner, was certainly true of Ismay.

The culture of collecting in British studio ceramics is no less complex than any other area of 20th- and 21stcentury acquisition; the reasons for its growth over the last one hundred years are various. There were the first collectors, who began in the early decades of the 1900s, figures like George Eumorfopoulos, Eric Milner-White and Henry Bergen. Generally speaking, they had a love for traditional, time-honoured forms, for essentially functional shapes made to enhance the

By the 1970s collecting pots had firmly caught on, and long buying queues for exhibition private views at the 9

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE Anthony Shaw – Collector domestic interior, but also objects that would enrich any museum collection. Eumorfopoulos principally bought early Oriental wares, but also contemporary studio pots by Charles and Nell Vyse (near-neighbours in Chelsea), for use about his house. Milner-White, a senior Anglican cleric, had a particular preference for the ‘fine art’ pots of William Staite Murray (who regarded his bowls and tall majestic vases as a form of sculpture), as well as individual pieces by Bernard Leach and his school. The American Henry Bergen was equally passionate about the burgeoning studio revival of English slipware, collecting it along with some stoneware. Significantly, their collections formed the corpus of early museum holdings too, with Milner-White’s going to York and Southampton, while Bergen’s is now held in Stoke-on-Trent’s Potteries Museum.

I am drawn to the very physicality of clay. I need to touch and be in the presence of the works I buy…what interests me is not how a work looks. The qualities I seek do not photograph well. We are becoming separated from the ‘real’ thing, and less able or concerned to understand the physical…I seek the ‘otherness’ of things, but they must have a human or animal spirit and defy being printable.

Anthony Shaw, 2017.

Anthony Shaw is a different kind of collector. It is not simply a ‘passion’. His acquisition particularly of ceramics (but also other related objects in two and three dimensions) has shown such a great commitment to the art of clay, a man for whom this most elemental and extraordinary of materials has been a constant allure. I think he is probably unique amongst his kind (‘a strange breed’, he wryly observes) because he lives and breathes it more than most. Anthony is someone who has been constantly ambitious for art that changes our perception, one that looks at a complex of unexpected landscapes. And that means the highest bar when it comes to his own dialogue with the visual and tactile, and with the artists and pieces which really excite him. It is because they extend his sensory perception, drawing on that mysterious quality that cannot be reproduced in words or photographs (as Braque once said, you can explain everything about a painting except the bit that matters). He has a self-possessed ability to recognise the real thing when he finds it, and then to put his all into supporting that artist and work. To say he inhabits this work is not to overstate matters, and he is more than a little stubborn in his beliefs.

In the early post-war years, the buying of studio pots in a more connoisseurial sense was growing slowly as the number of potters also increased. York Art Gallery recently benefited from the bequest of another important holding that had begun in this period, that of the W.A. Ismay Collection, in 2001. Ismay, a Wakefield librarian, began to purchase pots in 1955, initially those of Barbara Cass in York. The scale and rate of his buying were impressive and increasingly wide-ranging, with Ismay again principally interested in the functional, but with occasional purchasing that reflected the emerging interest in sculptural work and the growth of art college experimentation. By the end of his life Ismay had filled his small Wakefield home with some 3,600 pots, objects which covered every available surface. The crowding expressed personal obsession on a very large scale, and where his ownership was as much a reflection of Ismay’s varied friendships with potters as well as particular shops and galleries. He was also an important commentator, writing extensively on the subject. The sense of a collection being autobiographical in nature, revealing much about its owner, was certainly true of Ismay.

The culture of collecting in British studio ceramics is no less complex than any other area of 20th- and 21stcentury acquisition; the reasons for its growth over the last one hundred years are various. There were the first collectors, who began in the early decades of the 1900s, figures like George Eumorfopoulos, Eric Milner-White and Henry Bergen. Generally speaking, they had a love for traditional, time-honoured forms, for essentially functional shapes made to enhance the

By the 1970s collecting pots had firmly caught on, and long buying queues for exhibition private views at the 9

Gordon Baldwin Gordon Baldwin is an artist who, as the late Henry Rothschild put it, ‘works from the inside out’, building up each piece and marking surface so that what evolves is a kind of three-dimensional drawing. He has used the language of vessel-making as a springboard for his explorations, a ‘diary of thought’ as he has put it, and reflective of his absorption of all kinds of landscape, in art and literature, and most especially in music and the formative places important to him, particularly coastal ones, loving as he does the meetings of land and water. The pots are, in effect, distilled ‘inscapes’ (a phrase he likes) of thought and memory.

Born in 1932, Baldwin trained at Lincoln School of Art and the Central School in London, his roots as grounded in painting as clay, the medium which he has found most conducive to his explorations with colour, shape and surface. He has been a notable teacher, most particularly at the Central School and Eton College. His vocabulary has ranged from bowls to more complex articulated shapes, often monolithic in nature, but what underlines all his work is its personal, autobiographical quality. His art has helped to move ceramics away from a primarily functional language to one that is more open, searching and freshly expressive.

I found Gordon’s work very refreshing set against the mostly functional grey, brown and green pots that I had been buying. It was white with added abstract painted marks. It was about everything other than pots. It opened a dialogue with the Modernist Movement in Europe. It radically changed my view of what was possible with ceramics. The process of making led to the outcome which produced increasingly challenging sculptural works. Perfectly crafted pieces were not part of this agenda.

DW

I bought my first work from my window display of Gordon’s work. It was 1977, and I had a year of Ceramic Sculpture, including Sebastian Blackie, Michel Kuipers, Eileen Nisbet and Gordon Baldwin.

I had been looking for a while, but his prices were rather high and I was very pleased to find ‘Box for Jean Arp’ in my display that I could afford. I feel it was a great introduction to his work, part of a series of containers for ‘ideas’. The most important aspect of his work is the questions posed. So little is tied down, so the viewer can instinctively react. I remain captivated by the vulnerable poetry of his art.

right: Egyptian Black, 1968

AS

Height 60cm, earthenware

22

Gordon Baldwin Gordon Baldwin is an artist who, as the late Henry Rothschild put it, ‘works from the inside out’, building up each piece and marking surface so that what evolves is a kind of three-dimensional drawing. He has used the language of vessel-making as a springboard for his explorations, a ‘diary of thought’ as he has put it, and reflective of his absorption of all kinds of landscape, in art and literature, and most especially in music and the formative places important to him, particularly coastal ones, loving as he does the meetings of land and water. The pots are, in effect, distilled ‘inscapes’ (a phrase he likes) of thought and memory.

Born in 1932, Baldwin trained at Lincoln School of Art and the Central School in London, his roots as grounded in painting as clay, the medium which he has found most conducive to his explorations with colour, shape and surface. He has been a notable teacher, most particularly at the Central School and Eton College. His vocabulary has ranged from bowls to more complex articulated shapes, often monolithic in nature, but what underlines all his work is its personal, autobiographical quality. His art has helped to move ceramics away from a primarily functional language to one that is more open, searching and freshly expressive.

I found Gordon’s work very refreshing set against the mostly functional grey, brown and green pots that I had been buying. It was white with added abstract painted marks. It was about everything other than pots. It opened a dialogue with the Modernist Movement in Europe. It radically changed my view of what was possible with ceramics. The process of making led to the outcome which produced increasingly challenging sculptural works. Perfectly crafted pieces were not part of this agenda.

DW

I bought my first work from my window display of Gordon’s work. It was 1977, and I had a year of Ceramic Sculpture, including Sebastian Blackie, Michel Kuipers, Eileen Nisbet and Gordon Baldwin.

I had been looking for a while, but his prices were rather high and I was very pleased to find ‘Box for Jean Arp’ in my display that I could afford. I feel it was a great introduction to his work, part of a series of containers for ‘ideas’. The most important aspect of his work is the questions posed. So little is tied down, so the viewer can instinctively react. I remain captivated by the vulnerable poetry of his art.

right: Egyptian Black, 1968

AS

Height 60cm, earthenware

22

above, left to right: Vessel from the Belvedere Series, 1988

Vessel from the Belvedere Series, 1987–1988

Height 75cm, earthenware

Height 73 cm, earthenware

left, left to right: Monad, 1987

Monad, 1987

Height 65cm, earthenware

Height 66cm, earthenware

33

above, left to right: Vessel from the Belvedere Series, 1988

Vessel from the Belvedere Series, 1987–1988

Height 75cm, earthenware

Height 73 cm, earthenware

left, left to right: Monad, 1987

Monad, 1987

Height 65cm, earthenware

Height 66cm, earthenware

33

left: Imprint, 2012 180 x 40cm, wood and paint right: Veil, 2016 102.5 x 63 x 35 cm, sycamore and painted steel

46

left: Imprint, 2012 180 x 40cm, wood and paint right: Veil, 2016 102.5 x 63 x 35 cm, sycamore and painted steel

46

Early Boat Form with Village and Beasts, c. 1969

Moving House, 1972

Width 34.8 cm, stoneware

Width 15.5cm, stoneware

62

63

Early Boat Form with Village and Beasts, c. 1969

Moving House, 1972

Width 34.8 cm, stoneware

Width 15.5cm, stoneware

62

63

Ewen Henderson Many of the best potters were initially painters. When Ewen Henderson (1934–2000) went to study ceramics at Camberwell College of Arts in the late 1960s, he brought a painter’s freedom to clay, using it as an open canvas for his ideas. His early pots showed his abilities with colour as well as hand-built form, the surfaces increasingly painterly as he developed stains and oxides which coloured and often blistered surfaces.

The pieces eventually opened out into more intricate structures as he improvised with planes, edges and junctures, a spatial exploration at once delicate and powerful. There was a watercolourist’s sensitivity to texture and hue, his constructions reflective of various landscapes, of a wide range of found objects and shapes that were fertile with suggestion.

The work, constantly evolving, was as restless and energised as its maker, an art that posed questions rather than easy answers. As he remarked, ‘Every beginning has an infinite number of endings, and more excitingly, every ending has a number of new beginnings’, the best description of his physical approach. Henderson was essentially a collagist, a playful experimenter with clay, in his later years developing these ideas on paper too, drawn to the inherent layers, overlaps and spatial intrigues of complex forms.

I don’t remember knowing Ewen’s work when I saw his exhibition at Amalgam Gallery in Barnes in 1977.

My response was immediate and I bought a large shallow bowl and a small dish. These were quite unlike anything I had bought before. I didn’t question my reaction, simply following my instincts. Like all experiences you learn about yourself and about the world around you. The simple introduction of this work radically changed my field of interest and the ‘felt’ nature of works.

DW

Ewen, a passionate artist, was barely able to control his emotions in his best work. I was very excited when he started making complex structures and moved away from vessels. Early examples were informed by his interest in standing stones and bones and skulls picked up on walks. Looking at images now, taken from different angles, I thought I knew the work, but it suggests so much more that I wasn’t originally aware of. The ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’ go on.

AS right: Open Sided Monolith, c. 1989 Height 76 cm including stand, laminated mixed clays

72

Ewen Henderson Many of the best potters were initially painters. When Ewen Henderson (1934–2000) went to study ceramics at Camberwell College of Arts in the late 1960s, he brought a painter’s freedom to clay, using it as an open canvas for his ideas. His early pots showed his abilities with colour as well as hand-built form, the surfaces increasingly painterly as he developed stains and oxides which coloured and often blistered surfaces.

The pieces eventually opened out into more intricate structures as he improvised with planes, edges and junctures, a spatial exploration at once delicate and powerful. There was a watercolourist’s sensitivity to texture and hue, his constructions reflective of various landscapes, of a wide range of found objects and shapes that were fertile with suggestion.

The work, constantly evolving, was as restless and energised as its maker, an art that posed questions rather than easy answers. As he remarked, ‘Every beginning has an infinite number of endings, and more excitingly, every ending has a number of new beginnings’, the best description of his physical approach. Henderson was essentially a collagist, a playful experimenter with clay, in his later years developing these ideas on paper too, drawn to the inherent layers, overlaps and spatial intrigues of complex forms.

I don’t remember knowing Ewen’s work when I saw his exhibition at Amalgam Gallery in Barnes in 1977.

My response was immediate and I bought a large shallow bowl and a small dish. These were quite unlike anything I had bought before. I didn’t question my reaction, simply following my instincts. Like all experiences you learn about yourself and about the world around you. The simple introduction of this work radically changed my field of interest and the ‘felt’ nature of works.

DW

Ewen, a passionate artist, was barely able to control his emotions in his best work. I was very excited when he started making complex structures and moved away from vessels. Early examples were informed by his interest in standing stones and bones and skulls picked up on walks. Looking at images now, taken from different angles, I thought I knew the work, but it suggests so much more that I wasn’t originally aware of. The ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’ go on.

AS right: Open Sided Monolith, c. 1989 Height 76 cm including stand, laminated mixed clays

72

above: Small Enclosing Landscape Form, c. 1998 Height 34 cm, paperclay bone china left: Flame, c. 1984 Height 46cm, mixed clays

81

above: Small Enclosing Landscape Form, c. 1998 Height 34 cm, paperclay bone china left: Flame, c. 1984 Height 46cm, mixed clays

81

above: Twist Right, 2000 13 x 22cm, PVA and graphite on board right: Ripped Manilla, 143 x 99 cm, PVA, pencil and collage on board

110

above: Twist Right, 2000 13 x 22cm, PVA and graphite on board right: Ripped Manilla, 143 x 99 cm, PVA, pencil and collage on board

110

above: Remade Horse, 2013 Height 43cm, earthenware with mixed media left: The Wicker Man, 2013 Height 57cm, earthenware with mixed media

127

above: Remade Horse, 2013 Height 43cm, earthenware with mixed media left: The Wicker Man, 2013 Height 57cm, earthenware with mixed media

127

Nao Matsunaga The indeterminate nature of forms and structures that are ambiguous and shifting, ever re-defining themselves: this is an important aspect of Nao Matsunaga’s work. As he has said, ‘I am interested in creating or capturing movement in a still object’.

Japanese-born, Nao studied at Brighton University and the Royal College of Art, giving him a richly interdisciplinary knowledge of materials, and a freedom to stretch our perception of how something can look, and how it can feel. It is an art about the texture of shapes as well as surfaces, and how these may interact, ‘I am interested in exploring tensions such as raw and controlled, still and speed, weight and weightlessness in my work.’

A soft amorphism often combining with knottier, harder elements, Nao’s liberations extend into expansive surface marking, objects that are as much about painting as sculpture. Some of his pieces have a loosely ceremonial or ritual aspect, some touch on figuration, others are purely abstract, but his very direct approach makes us think afresh about the endless possibilities and mysteries of, as Brancusi put it, ‘reanimated matter’.

I felt interested in but uncertain of Nao’s work for several years until he brought wood and clay together.

He stripped the bark and reworked the surface, making an interesting collaboration between the two mediums. ‘Duality’ was the first purchase, summing up my immediate response to the work. Heavy clay cloud form, supported on spindly wood branches.

Caught movement in a work for a shrine.

DW

Painting has freed up the work even more, and experiments with other mediums and new uses of forms of glazing continue to expand his vocabulary.

Using his whole body in the making has concentrated the personal nature and individuality of the work.

AS

right: Duality, 2011 Height 87cm, earthenware and wood

152

Nao Matsunaga The indeterminate nature of forms and structures that are ambiguous and shifting, ever re-defining themselves: this is an important aspect of Nao Matsunaga’s work. As he has said, ‘I am interested in creating or capturing movement in a still object’.

Japanese-born, Nao studied at Brighton University and the Royal College of Art, giving him a richly interdisciplinary knowledge of materials, and a freedom to stretch our perception of how something can look, and how it can feel. It is an art about the texture of shapes as well as surfaces, and how these may interact, ‘I am interested in exploring tensions such as raw and controlled, still and speed, weight and weightlessness in my work.’

A soft amorphism often combining with knottier, harder elements, Nao’s liberations extend into expansive surface marking, objects that are as much about painting as sculpture. Some of his pieces have a loosely ceremonial or ritual aspect, some touch on figuration, others are purely abstract, but his very direct approach makes us think afresh about the endless possibilities and mysteries of, as Brancusi put it, ‘reanimated matter’.

I felt interested in but uncertain of Nao’s work for several years until he brought wood and clay together.

He stripped the bark and reworked the surface, making an interesting collaboration between the two mediums. ‘Duality’ was the first purchase, summing up my immediate response to the work. Heavy clay cloud form, supported on spindly wood branches.

Caught movement in a work for a shrine.

DW

Painting has freed up the work even more, and experiments with other mediums and new uses of forms of glazing continue to expand his vocabulary.

Using his whole body in the making has concentrated the personal nature and individuality of the work.

AS

right: Duality, 2011 Height 87cm, earthenware and wood

152

above: Mute, 2013 Height 27cm, stoneware right: Untitled, 2004 Height 24cm, stoneware

176

above: Mute, 2013 Height 27cm, stoneware right: Untitled, 2004 Height 24cm, stoneware

176

Nancy Baldwin

Val Barry

Richard Batterham

Penelope Bennett

Seascape, 1996

Flat Form, 1977

Breakfast Bowl, late 1960s

Slip Decorated Dish, 1978

Nancy Baldwin (1935–2021) trained at Lincoln School of Art and the Central School, where she studied ceramics, continuing her tuition in a more informal sense at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, painting and dyeing costumes for the resident ballet and opera companies. Stylistically she was a hard painter to bracket, having worked in both pure abstraction and figuration, with much of her art an interesting synthesis of and (tension) between the two.

Val Barry (1937–2018) trained at Sir John Cass School of Art in the late 1960s, before setting up a studio in Crouch End, North London. Barry’s work in stoneware and porcelain had clearcut forms, her individual hand-built and thrown pieces relating to natural, abstract shapes in the landscape, but with their own quietly modern geometry and definition. Her characteristically flattened vessels with their crisply executed rims and subtly nuanced surfaces, often with rounded or curved bases, suggested an innate movement.

They explored natural energies, as well as the mysteries of containment, and expressed an appreciation of human-built structures too.

Richard Batterham (1936–2021) was one of the most original but faithful potters to have emerged from the Leach School.

Original in the sense that he evolved his own very personal functional style, but one still acknowledging the best of simple medieval European and Far Eastern pots. It was his ability to refine and distil these various influences into a distinctive range of domestic ware and individual pieces that marked him out.

Penelope Bennett was a student of Ewen Henderson’s in the 1970s, and has combined her ceramics with her work as a journalist and gardening writer. She is a gifted maker of bold, hand-built earthenware; the pots have a distinct freedom and softness of approach more akin to the natural expression of their African and Pre-Columbian forebears than much other contemporary work in this idiom.

The work, whether on canvas or paper, was often autobiographical in content and drew from the important landscapes in her life, from India and France to Yorkshire and North Wales, as well as the literature she admired. Her narratives were also physically very expressive celebrations of line and colour and the medium itself, often with complex spatial qualities that underlined their emotional charge.

Essentially pictures about feeling and recollection, they strongly evoked the poetry of place and the natural world.

With other ceramists such as Eileen Nisbet and Elisabeth Fritsch, there was an exacting precision to Barry’s spatial drawing, but it was off-kilter too, moving away from the symmetries and conformities of most contemporary vessel shapes. This very restrained and concentrated work is deserving of reappraisal. Barry gave up ceramics in the mid 1980s to focus on bronze and other materials, working under the name Valerie Fox. Her large bronze sculptures had a commanding simplicity, monumental in scale and rich in patina, cutting the air with great clarity.

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Her bowls and variously formed jars and dishes have a directness and simplicity, smoke-fired red clay with burnished surfaces. Some are incised, others painted with geometric earth colours, akin to the designs and hues of African and South American textiles and ceramics. Avoiding over-wrought, technique-led making, Bennett’s pots are vigorous and refreshingly intuitive.

Trained at the Leach Pottery, Batterham set up a workshop at Durweston in Dorset in 1959, where he remained ever afterwards. He worked primarily with ash and iron glazes on stoneware, but also made porcelain, and occasionally fired with salt. Cutting, faceting, turning and incising were his preferred methods of enhancing form, without losing any clarity of design. His big bowls and tall bottles have a strongly sculptural quality. Batterham was in many ways the quintessential country potter, working quietly and with dedication to the tempo of the seasons.

185

Nancy Baldwin

Val Barry

Richard Batterham

Penelope Bennett

Seascape, 1996

Flat Form, 1977

Breakfast Bowl, late 1960s

Slip Decorated Dish, 1978

Nancy Baldwin (1935–2021) trained at Lincoln School of Art and the Central School, where she studied ceramics, continuing her tuition in a more informal sense at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, painting and dyeing costumes for the resident ballet and opera companies. Stylistically she was a hard painter to bracket, having worked in both pure abstraction and figuration, with much of her art an interesting synthesis of and (tension) between the two.

Val Barry (1937–2018) trained at Sir John Cass School of Art in the late 1960s, before setting up a studio in Crouch End, North London. Barry’s work in stoneware and porcelain had clearcut forms, her individual hand-built and thrown pieces relating to natural, abstract shapes in the landscape, but with their own quietly modern geometry and definition. Her characteristically flattened vessels with their crisply executed rims and subtly nuanced surfaces, often with rounded or curved bases, suggested an innate movement.

They explored natural energies, as well as the mysteries of containment, and expressed an appreciation of human-built structures too.

Richard Batterham (1936–2021) was one of the most original but faithful potters to have emerged from the Leach School.

Original in the sense that he evolved his own very personal functional style, but one still acknowledging the best of simple medieval European and Far Eastern pots. It was his ability to refine and distil these various influences into a distinctive range of domestic ware and individual pieces that marked him out.

Penelope Bennett was a student of Ewen Henderson’s in the 1970s, and has combined her ceramics with her work as a journalist and gardening writer. She is a gifted maker of bold, hand-built earthenware; the pots have a distinct freedom and softness of approach more akin to the natural expression of their African and Pre-Columbian forebears than much other contemporary work in this idiom.

The work, whether on canvas or paper, was often autobiographical in content and drew from the important landscapes in her life, from India and France to Yorkshire and North Wales, as well as the literature she admired. Her narratives were also physically very expressive celebrations of line and colour and the medium itself, often with complex spatial qualities that underlined their emotional charge.

Essentially pictures about feeling and recollection, they strongly evoked the poetry of place and the natural world.

With other ceramists such as Eileen Nisbet and Elisabeth Fritsch, there was an exacting precision to Barry’s spatial drawing, but it was off-kilter too, moving away from the symmetries and conformities of most contemporary vessel shapes. This very restrained and concentrated work is deserving of reappraisal. Barry gave up ceramics in the mid 1980s to focus on bronze and other materials, working under the name Valerie Fox. Her large bronze sculptures had a commanding simplicity, monumental in scale and rich in patina, cutting the air with great clarity.

184

Her bowls and variously formed jars and dishes have a directness and simplicity, smoke-fired red clay with burnished surfaces. Some are incised, others painted with geometric earth colours, akin to the designs and hues of African and South American textiles and ceramics. Avoiding over-wrought, technique-led making, Bennett’s pots are vigorous and refreshingly intuitive.

Trained at the Leach Pottery, Batterham set up a workshop at Durweston in Dorset in 1959, where he remained ever afterwards. He worked primarily with ash and iron glazes on stoneware, but also made porcelain, and occasionally fired with salt. Cutting, faceting, turning and incising were his preferred methods of enhancing form, without losing any clarity of design. His big bowls and tall bottles have a strongly sculptural quality. Batterham was in many ways the quintessential country potter, working quietly and with dedication to the tempo of the seasons.

185

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Page 1

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE

David Whiting is an independent writer and curator.

He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, and a trustee of the Anthony Shaw Collection.

Philip Sayer is a distinguished and versatile photographer whose work has included photojournalism, portraiture, interiors and architectural work.

The Anthony Shaw Collection is a trust which is still actively acquiring work. For a full list of artists included in the Collection and information on how you can support the work of the trust, please go to its website at www.anthonyshawcollection.org

THE ANTHONY SHAW COLLECTION

978 - 3 - 89790 -711- 9

9 783897 907119

ceramics sculpture painting

SEEING WITH ANOTHER EYE

AS_Jacket_final dimensions.qxp_Layout 1

This long awaited book celebrates the Anthony Shaw Collection, one of Britain’s most important private collections of studio ceramics, sculpture and painting.

Anthony Shaw (born 1951) began collecting in the early 1970s, initially focussing on studio pots, but expanding into more sculptural work by the following decade, with a particular emphasis on major artists such as Gillian Lowndes, Ewen Henderson, Gordon Baldwin, Sara Radstone and the highly versatile Bryan Illsley.

The Collection, now in trust, and originally shown in Anthony Shaw’s London home, is now exhibited as part of the Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA) at York Art Gallery.

In the present century it has been enriched by equally searching artists such as Nao Matsunaga and Kerry Jameson. They have brought their own remarkable imaginations to bear on a broad range of materials, not just clay.

This publication, with principal photography by Philip Sayer, surveys the full range of ceramics and sculptural objects and paintings acquired by Shaw, and provides a valuable insight into what has been a particularly fertile and enriching period in British art, as well as one man’s unique collecting vision.

front cover: Gordon Baldwin, Picasso Variation Blue II, 1984 Height 20 cm, earthenware back cover: Gillian Lowndes, Curling Loofah Collage, 1995 Width 33 cm, mixed media