In two local shows, contemporary takes on a traditional craft and works based on motivational metaphors are themes that forge the present from the past.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published August 4, 2005
[Images from Florida Craftsmen
Nobuyasu Kondo, teapot.
Tetsu Goto, lidded pot.
ST. PETERSBURG - If you think an exhibition devoted mostly to unadorned teapots would be boring, you would be wrong.
"A Glimpse Into Echizen Ceramics" at Florida Craftsmen Gallery illustrates the prime directive of fine craft: Form must serve function. And the best fine craft does more: It honors the daily routines of life with objects that provide pleasure, not just expedience, when they are used.
The teapots and other vessels come from the Echizen region of Japan, one of the famous Six Old Kilns sites where artisans have made ceramics for centuries in wood-burning kilns. Each place had a particular clay that suited certain kinds of pottery. Echizen produced mostly simple, functional pieces for the region's agrarian population, coiling and shaping rather than throwing them on a pottery wheel.
In the 1970s, a revived interest in traditional crafts led artists to the old pottery centers, including Echizen. Today, leading Japanese potters work there, creating vessels that invoke the region's heritage. All the examples at Florida Craftsmen are by these contemporary artists. The straightforward designs and natural glazes give the items a humble appearance, but look closely and you see the meticulous attention to detail that distinguishes them individually.
Could anything be simpler than Tetsu Goto's lidded pot with its subtle basket-weave surface and notched lip? It begs to be touched. And used. So too with the teapots, water vessels, sake flasks, pitchers, those things with the kind of aesthetic integrity that can turn a simple act into a ritual. Even their packaging is elegant: well-made wooden boxes with ribbon ties are sometimes displayed with their contents.
The exhibition includes other pieces - kimonos, furniture, prints and paintings, some older ceramics - for contextual purposes, including a rare green-glazed raku water container from the 19th century.
Smaller, complementary art and crafts fill other galleries, including Susan Frame's sumi-e paintings, McKenzie Smith's lovely platters, Joe McKay's vases studded with wartlike protrusions and Yachiyo Gunn's origami.
* * *
Most gallery space at the Arts Center has been taken over by the annual summer members' show, which is always based on a theme. This year it's "Marks and Metaphors," for which members were asked to submit work "based on symbols or metaphors that have served as inspiration," according to the center's brochure.
It's basically a free-for-all exhibition without the coherence of former ones, but it probably better serves its members (which is its point) than those in the past with more restrictions.
Tucked into the back gallery are two small exhibitions by Rose Marie Prins and Rebecca Skelton that mitigate the jumble of the rest of the space. For several years, Skelton has painted geometric grids with abstract and representational images, sort of fitting round pegs into square holes. The formality of her compositions is balanced by forceful brush strokes.
Her theme is passage. An orb turns in lunar stages, a face devolves into translucence or evolves from blankness to expression, a baby forms out of a void, a fecund female body becomes one sagging with age. Some of the grids are painted with deep swipes of color fading to black; others are like containers holding talismans. She titled the group "Rondo" after a musical form of repetition, and the notes here have a melancholy refrain lightened occasionally. The piece of fudge in Desire, Labor, Regret is a symbol we all can claim.
Prins presents us with a more cerebral melancholia in her heavily worked canvases, which could be described, with their slashes stitched together with coarse wire, as mutilations. She has begun adding found objects to them, and sometimes they enrich her aggressive technique, as in Chiti Shakti, on which a piece of metal curves across the surface like an injured spine held with a crude pin. But a group of small constructions seems self-conscious and too precious for its background muscularity. Two departures from her somber palette, Dervish Dance and Shaman's Dance, are fabulous expressionist swoops of black against dense and vibrant blue and tan.
"A Glimpse Into Echizen Ceramics" is at Florida Craftsmen Gallery, 501 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, through Aug. 27. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Free. (727) 821-7391. "Rose Marie Prins: Enigmas" and "Rebecca Skelton: Rondo" are at the Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, through Aug. 21. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Free. (727) 822-7872.
