Ceramic Review: Masterclass with Marshall Colman

[Music] my name's Marshall Coleman I'm a decorated pottery in the tin lace tradition I mixed my own clay because I can't buy a clay which has got exactly the right color so what I do is to mix it with three parts of white clay to one part of red clay which gives a pink terracotta I'm completely dependent on my road of pugmill a nice German pug mill which is very efficient I believe in working smart rather than working hard so the clay mixing is done by machine the final process is just wedging up on the bench to make sure that the clay is evenly mixed and that there are no bubbles in it then when I'm throwing I like the throwing to be quite thin and light so I'm throwing up the jug and trying to make it as thin as possible it's a process which you get better as time goes on I'm still not perfectly satisfied with the work that I produce but I feel I'm getting a nice lightness and a and a thinness of edge because I'm making tableware it's got to be the right weight when you pick it up when you pick up a drug you you want to lift the liquid and not the clay when I make the handles I extrude them through a die which I've cut and the dies are cut for different diets for different different handles different sections different sizes and I like to cut it with that a rigid surface because it's pleasant to cousin to hold it it so it's lively but also that rich service allows the different thicknesses of glazing to show through so the extruded handles are cut to length and they're applied to the fairly hard thrown body with slip and the best way to make a hard drawing is to score the points of which the two parts drawing and put slip between them and then press them on then it's cleaned off with a brush and a sponge over the years I've found the best firing cycle for both the glaze and the bisque I started off with the conventional method of studio pratas use of firing the bist to a thousand degrees and me and the glaze of something between 1050 and 1100 then I found that the best way to do it was to revert to the Continental process and have a high-five bisque and in the end when I settled on was to fire bisque and glaze at the same temperature which is about 1060 it's in the nature of the team glaze which is an incredibly troublesome glaze the whole point about ting glaze is that what you want is a glaze which doesn't move very much you're putting a decoration on the surface of it if the glaze runs the decoration round so you want a glaze it doesn't run [Music] the pattern that I'm decorating here is a sort of oriental packing I decided that the way to improve my work was to go to the people who do it best so I went to a course in London's Chinatown on the Chinese style of painting so the little brushes that I'm using here that little round brush is a squirrel brush and the long wig is a sable brush and those are just lovely to work with I really like working with those I prefer to use raw oxides rather than prepared pigments or stains unfortunately at earthenware temperatures it's virtually impossible to get read from using a raw oxide so I have to use prepared stains for the black I mix my own my own color it's a mixture of cobalt and manganese and that gives a very nice a very nice black of varying intensity what I'm trying to do in my work is to take this very traditional method and to produce something which is modern very much of a present and work that can be used in a contemporary home they're designed to be practical as well as beautiful and I hope that that's what I succeeded in doing

Channel: Ceramic Review

Views: 37,068

Rating: 4.9709444 out of 5

Keywords: ceramic, ceramics, ceramicart, pottery, design, handmade, art, masterclass, ceramicreview, tutorial, craft, earthenware, jug, tableware, terracotta

Id: q9YilxcLmQY

Length: 4min 53sec (293 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017