MasterPiece -- The Art of Carl Cunningham-Cole

you boy why boy ah touches you when you least expect it to you see something and it motivates you to understand something not only about yourself but the rest of the world it will give you a certain protection it will give you a feeding of life in itself well actually I'm an Englishman and born in 1942 in a place called Farnum sorry and because my grandparents had retired and were living in a place called Torquay which is been nicknamed England's California I grew up there next to the see the forest and the granite rocks of Dartmoor and I heard it very nicely very nice youth useful years I think what really fascinated me was when I was 9 years old and I won the first prize in one of the younger schools where we were all allowed to to make a figure something from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I decided I should make happy and I was so engrossed in making this thing but I had no idea that it was like a competition and at the end of the afternoon when everybody assembled all of their little figures it appeared that I got the first prize and I saw there was a lot of fun clay is normally brought down to an estuary it's taken a few million years to produce this sort of sedimentation which can vary a great deal depending on the sort of mountainous area comes from I have two great help I have a what we call a pug mill in English it's a machine that mixes all the clay out so in certain cases I'm having to prepare my own bodies which means different sorts of the clay so if I'm buying I can say for Saline from this part of the world or importing this sort of stoneware from another part of the world I can add to it with the knowledge that I have about these materials and so I mix all of this into a new mixture which becomes my recipe then you have to wedge it you have this physical process of you know like standing in a bakery or something you know making loaves of bread the idea now is that by wedging in a certain way you are extruding possible air bubbles if you have an air bubble locked in the clay and it goes up to a certain temperature it will automatically blow itself out that's the end of your beautiful vows how long did you work on that that was a shame you miss the air bubble you from my experiences in China and Japan and career and especially being something of an Englishman and I thought that I could try and involve something of the natural culture around here the rocks you know what grows beautifully here the great ferns and a lot of wild flowers which had never seen ever in England I thought perhaps I could go out and adopt them everything you sort of believed in in a sense of about nature you have the opportunity to participate in I allow the grass to grow I mean there are thousands of different plants which you can at one point in life at least go down on your knees to and have a look at I could hear this sort of strange noise out there I heard it several times for a couple of days and then I realized that of course it was some sort of an animal I decided one late one afternoon I'd go out and try and find him I couldn't find anything and later in the evening I heard it again and I thought I'll go out and have another look and finally I see this little creature coming on you know wobbly legs and it's about you know it's like a cat with long legs very very thin all the speckles on the back and I realized while dear and when I picked her up she was covered in ticks and also the parasites and she looked like this I cleaned her out by top of all these parasites and bugs off her and then Lily and Princess Lea and grew up with us here she got bigger and bigger and bigger you know she got closer and closer to me and finally I had this amazing link it sort of telepathy she could feel it in a sense that you know now I was going out looking for and she would come or I could call her and she would come and there thought it after two years she kept skipping into the sitting room and running around the kitchen and she was pregnant I went out and called her and she called me back and in that moment I realized that she had gone to exactly the same places where I found her she came skipping out of the grass there and she had this little guy running behind her you know the little baby came up to me he'd just been born and it was totally accepting me immediately and she sort of looked at me like you know and then she she was gone again and she got a second one out so that I brought them and them both home and a new cycle began again and when it's complete these forms you're making you allow it out to dry now the drying process is depending obviously on how much clay you have it you know if you have small things obviously a jar very quickly but when you're throwing these pieces that I enjoy making and you have 50 kilos or up it can take this process up to a year in order to get all the water out I believe I'll have this soundness of heart to feel that the earth is beneath my feet and the grass is not greener in the next guy's garden after all but if you saddle and you grow roots everybody will have a background and in your back on you will appreciate that this world around us is paradise when you see all those leaves waving you think mom it's an incredible force out there these things that we don't understand it's things we can't basically control but why should we even try we can protect ourselves against it today we have the technology full for this self preservation but we also have the technology blow ourselves right off the face of paradise I believe we're living in paradise but we somehow lost contact when you're making a glaze you have to know basically why it works you take all the basic elements what the planet is made of you have to know what all of these different things to add temperatures then you put them together as explained one on one then you put three together then you try four together you see what happens when you've got what we call a basic glaze of base recipe then you have to understand how you affect this with color and now we go into the metal there's two caning because copper is manganese there's iron its longest and each of these metals reacts in a different way when it's put into the glaze and then you can see what it does how it interacts and from that you can change the spectrum of your art you can create your own palette just like a painter from the moment you start firing it if you calculate 16 hours in my case to get to the maximum temperature then allow yourself one week of cooling and that looks like a glaze firing just don't go over before you know don't be impatient tell yourself that you know this guy's gotta be something at least one piece is going to be good and if you get one piece out which is spectacular be grateful you know most of the things I make it's an individual collection each time it's all unique pieces so every firing varies there's never two packing is the same it's not like industry where you have ten thousand tissues which go through or dinner plate then just go through this tunnel oven here you have to balance it and you have to space it and you make sure that it has small porcelain figures perhaps underneath to raise it so it doesn't stick on the plate for example you have to be very very accurate so each packing is like put in there and you're saying well okay it's in balance it looks good let's go for it let's see what we can do now she went out of here in the morning her babies walked out with her they were running around in the garden it was no beautiful mornings you never skipping around enjoying themselves and later in the afternoon I went over to the firing studio and I heard I just heard an impact and I something inside me said my intuition said to me I got you something happened out there but whatever it wasn't hitting it was a truck just kept going and and of course she didn't come home that evening then I had to go out and look for her and the next morning I found what's left not much left after a 40 ton truck if you look at the painting if you look at a pot if you look at a sculpture if it touches you then that's what art is about I don't make two things the same ever I can of course I mean I have the ability but I don't see any point or intention in just illustrating yourself or copying yourself I'm looking for this challenge I would like to make things better than I ever made before you I can experience cold nights for example in London when I lived there or in Tokyo and it's there but here in Sweden it's like hibernation almost you know you're almost fighting to stay alive because some some nights here are believable I've been hacking away this for the last 30 years excuse me ladies and gentlemen but sometimes it is and it sucks uninspired is when you can't pay your bills you know when they come and cut off your loot Rizzoli will you you know you got nothing to eat and you know when you're having a bloody missiles talk effectively that can happen second definitely happened to you as an artist once you've started to produce something in clay you have to give a constant attention if the window is open if there is a door open you know what the temperature is in the room if you put it in the kiln wait until you get up to around 400 degrees folks you're going to have quite a bang you I seen enough of suffering there's a saying but in order to be a saint you really have to visited hell first then you know the difference good evening hell hurt when you're unhappy when you're miserable when your health is going down and when there's nobody out there you can rely on trust that's a real sad place to be until the choice is up to you nature's always playing tricks on us because nature is something unpredictable when you see things at a distance and it doesn't touch you because you've never been there does this still stop you from saying to yourself maybe I can make a difference nature is there to guide us it is a reflection of what we're doing to it as to what is going to give to us because without it we're all going to die you have to respect it you have to respect nature for this extraordinary nature that it has you you you it's one of the larger things from the series I made in 1994 I think it was porcelain stoneware combination it's thrown in three sections the largest section you see in here is round about 80 kilos throwing on a kick wheel in fact all of it is made on a kick wheel and you can see I've had to put them together so I've sealed them with silver so that it will be inseparable for the future I'd say it's round about 200 round about 200 kilos and when I made it originally in the studio it was 2 meters 2 meters 5 and during the firing process of course of each section shrinks but of course it shrinks so that it's supposed to fit the working time physical working time is about a year and a half for me on a piece this size it's because of the drawing process it has to enjoy absolutely perfectly each section so they fit exactly we're all here at the opening of my final collection of work for this summer collection the work has gone through the last of the firing processes glaze firing I think I've reached the temperature between 1300 and 80 and 1,400 degrees on this firing and as you'll see the seals fall off the door none of us have ever seen what's in here of course I know in a form what I have in there but I have no idea to the finished result it's like you know in the dew in the hands of the divine so to say so let's uh let's start and move it a little huh now I'm gonna have a look anyway holy schmoly this one is from 93 it's in white stone way which is a mixture of porcelain and stoneware together and it's fired basically at my thirteen to fourteen hundred and fifty degrees the difference between the two with this incision glaze is that this one has in fact received a little higher temperature and you can see that the gloss or the glow on the incision has melted into the structure or the form and I believe a very acceptable way again it's a very simple motive from nature and I think the form is it's a part of our planet or after having visited several people in career they showed me this incision technique where they not only cut the clay out but they're putting other white clays inside of the cuts that you make um this one is called the sea surfaces solution and if we remember the old myth of sisyphus he was always trying to get this stone d up the mountain and every time he got to the top the stone fell down again huh I think now we're changing many of the old myths that today we're living in a technological world and I think I helped him a little because the rock is up on top of the mountain and it with our aid and our attention we will be able to create miracles together with this incredible technology we have today smash-and-grab it's all handmade it's not made on a wheel like many of my pieces but it's modeled and it's all made in porcelain I think the largest section which is this piece here that's probably one massive piece probably around 20 odd kilos 25 kilos maximum and it has very much to do with nostalgia you know when you're growing up by the sea it's going to be showing you a part of yourself which you want to reinvestigate so to say you want to see things from the past the present and then perhaps you're going to change something for the future at the moment I think we've got some very nice pieces here I mean within a few seconds of taking them out I feel that the glazes have melded the way I wanted some of them are little exceptional the largest piece here that with I think a very fine reading slug will have to be repaired like in as they did in China all those years ago you know they used to if you find a dish with a small crackle in it or small split in it and it doesn't spoil the dish by working on it then of course you can fill this object with silver and then you will have an entire piece again this one here is very nice this has gone through second glaze process now in other words it's had three firings I think I leave this one the way it is now I don't think I'd like to go further with that the smaller ring I think that's very nice in this Chinese crackle salad the globe in the front I would say that's very very nice glazing effect there the texture on it is it was very nice very easy to touch same with this here this is a very pale almost looks like a rhythm wear but it is a porcelain and this one here well I've seen things like this before but this this is quite nice so yes I'm satisfied very satisfied at this point there's not everything which comes out and turns itself into gold something over - this is pretty impossible I have to break it off with a with an iron bar or something it's a shame because some of the glazes are rather nice there but yeah that's just how it goes sometimes you know you can't win them every time so some years ago I got invited to somebody's home as I looked across the sitting room with some beautiful objects in there I could see on this glass table his old Chinese aren't an old Chinese buyers with the lid on it the top and I went up to this table and I looked at this bars and I thought wow definitely Chinese I was very careful I picked it off and I kept a lid together with the bars and I turned it around and I thought to myself wow if I had made some I own something like this I probably would have put a little extra do loot over there or in a dot here or something or other I wonder which period of China it was from and I turn this thing upside down I almost dropped it right through the glass table because in the bottom it said Carl Cunningham Cole you you you

Channel: Johan Robach

Views: 35,003

Rating: 4.880374 out of 5

Keywords: Drawing, Painting, Art (Collection Category), Fine Art (Literary Genre), Artist, ceramics, Johan Robach, Carl Cunningham-Cole, Algutsboda, Porcelain, Sculpture, Paintings

Id: 5h6WprGIqfE

Length: 44min 57sec (2697 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 24 2013