DISAPPEARING TALENT

Few artists make a living from art and many give up completely. Looking in the archive of Central Saint Martin’s art school I found several talented ceramics students who never practiced after graduating. I was looking for photos of work done by students of Dora Billington to show in the exhibition I’m curating at the Crafts Study Cente and Ruthin Craft Craft Centre at the end of the year.

In the early 1950s some students made work with an eye to mass production and others made pieces intended as individual works of art. Ines Reich made the elegant teapot above with a transfer decoration for her diploma exam in 1951, with a  contemporary Festival of Britain feel, but she appears to have disappeared without trace thereafter.

Doreen Lambert made this well-considered dinner service (below) for her diploma show in 1954 but she had a career in teaching rather than design. She kept it all her life and it sold only after her death, when it came up at auction at Roseberry’s in 2014.

The Central was famous in the ‘fifties as a counter-current to the conservative Leach style of studio pottery, and this fine collection (below), exhibited by Helen Sadar in 1959, is typical of the sort of ceramics that were being explored then. She also disappeared without trace.

THE CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE

The Crafts Study Centre is gradually digitizing its archives and putting items online, and I saw several today from the Lucie Rie archives that I hadn’t seen before, including personal and family portraits. You can view them here.

ROBIN WELCH

I was sad to hear of the death of Robin Welch, one of the finest studio potters in Britain. In recent years he exhibited at Art in Clay, Hatfield, and I looked forward to chatting to him in his regular place at the show and buying some of his pots.

Robin was born in in 1936 and studied at Nuneaton and Penzance schools of art, receiving his NDD in sculpture and ceramics in 1953. He spent time at the Leach pottery in St Ives and he told me that, when he began exhibiting, Leach didn’t like his work (which some might take as a commendation). From 1956 he did his national service with the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment, taking the opportunity in the Middle East to visit peasant potteries. He then went on to do a postgraduate course in ceramics at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

The Central was led in the post-war years by William Johnstone, who had moved it away from the arts and crafts (it later changed its name to the Central School of Art and Design) and introduced a design training based on the Bauhaus system and a collegiate style of teaching which exposed students to a variety of disciplines. Ceramics students were aware of the new American painting and in Cornwall Robin himself had already been inspired  by Terry Frost, John Tunnard and Barbara Tribe. They were taught by William Turnbull, Alan Davie and Eduardo Paolozzi (who, typically, was based in the textile department). Ceramics was led by Gilbert Harding Green, a man of wide culture who encouraged innovation, assisted by William Newland, Nicholas Vergette, Ian Auld, Dan Arbeid, Kenneth Clark and Gillian Lowndes.

After leaving the Central, Robin set up in London and got his first break from Henry Rothschild, who gave him £100 and carte blanche to make pots to be sold at the Primavera gallery. He spent three years in Australia, establishing a pottery with Ian Sprague, and returned to England in 1965 to set up the pottery at Stradbroke, Suffolk, where he worked until his death. At Stradbroke he launched high-volume production with half a dozen assistants, using industrial machinery which he’d been taught to use in Stoke-on-Trent. He spent twenty years in this sort of work, selling kitchen ware in interior design stores, but from the 1980s he made large, individual pieces like the one shown in the picture, for which he’s now better known.

A nice pamphlet about him, full of photos, Robin Welch – A Life, was produced by his granddaughter for a school project, but Robin told me he was sorry that no-one had wanted to write a full biography. Perhaps someone will now.