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Potters Guild of British Columbia

1359 Cartwright St., Granville Island
Vancouver, B.C. V6H 3R7

NEWSLETTER

SEPTEMBER 1991

ISSN 6319 812x

A MASTER ARTIST ON MASTERY IN ART

The following is reprinted from the Au-
gust 24 Saturday Review, with the per-
mission of the Vancouner Sun cane with
thanks to the artist and author, BILL
REID.

Whatever else may be said about this
troubled century, now entering its final
uncertain decades, it has given those
Interested in the material manifesta-
tons of the human experience an op-
portunity to see at close hand a sweep-
ing representation of manmade objects.

Since the "50s, it seema that all that was
required of at least the majority of afflu-
ent North Americans and Europeans
whe wished to visit the Jain temples of
India or the stone gardens of Japan, or
certainly something as accessible as
classical Greece or the High Renais-
sance in Tuscany, was the desire to go.

Even if this were inconvenient, muse-
ums of various kinds, art. sclence and
ethnology, either local or close by, with
their travelling or permanent exhibt-
tons, were established or vastly ex-
panded, and the plunder of myriad
ireasure troves became the visual play-
things of all who bothered to look.

And everybody's surrogate eye, the In-
sallably curious camera, has explored,
atleast superficially, every comer where
man haa scratched or scrawled or
painted or carved or constructed his
imprint on the landscape, So that mow,
even Chose parts wrought with greatest
care in the elder days of art, solely for Lhe
perusal of the gods, are only as remote
as our coffee tables and television
screens, readily seen by the humblest of
mortals.

Well, something must have come out of
all this.

Certainly the sure knowledge that men
of all places and times are much more
alike than theyre wnalike, that ideas

like aesthetics, art, excellence and beauty
are net the exclusive property of those
who happen to have invented words to
describe them.

Algo | think that once we deseribe our
ethnocentric, Werarchical ideas of how
the world works, we will find that one
basic quality unites all the works of
mankind Uhat speak to us in human,
recornizable voloes across the barriers
of time, culture, and space: The simple
quality of being well-made.

We may be charmed momentarily by a
nalve painting, or shudder from the
impact of the old magic of a mail fetish,
but it ls the elegant line, the subtle
curve, the sure precise brugh stroke
that gives us that sudden aching sense
of identity with the distant cousin who
first lovingly made it.

Of course, it doesn't start or end there.
[tis the direction of line, the expression
of the curve, the purpose of the brush
stroke that moves or excites us, but
without that old casual mastery of tech-
nique, the message is muddied and ob-
scure, orso poor in the shades ofmeaning
that constitute human communication
that it becomes meaningless, or even
worse, boring.

Ina world where we more and more seek
outand admire the finely crafled object,
we less anc less know how to make it.
The old, infinilely precious web which
carried the hard-won skills from one
generation of arlisans to the next, which
provided Uhe Visual and lactile language
by which the artisls of every age could
give expression to their limes and them-
selves, has become in our time as thin
and frayed as our hope of heaven.

It may be, as some say, that new skills
and other means will give rise to other
equally valid expressions.

But thia doesn't diminish the joss of that

which was for so many millenia an
important and essential part of our
humanity.

So it makes even more important the
occasional bright segments of that web
that still retain thelr strength and
elegance.

Bill Reid

GUILD MEETING
in the
Gallery of BC Ceramics
on Monday, September 23rd
at 7) pm.

Meet Dawid Lawson and other
members of the Kootenay Group
show.

David will give a brief presentation.

o