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Ceramics Monthly November 2003

36

MICHAEL SIMON

Relatively simple in form, the warm-hued stoneware vessels of

Georgia potter Michael Simon belie the complexity of their rela-

tionship with the ceramics tradition, a relationship that starts

with the concept of utility and ends in the realm of aesthetics. If

Simon began his career, as did so many aspiring potters in the

1970s, with visions of a kind of reform in domestic design—

heady expectations for the role of pots in revitalizing the sensibili-

ties of the modern uninspired consumer—over the years, he has

become less zealous about utility. He still believes that pottery is

fulfilled by use, but he no longer expects that all of his vessels will

circulate regularly between the shelf and the table. This does not,

however, signal a retreat from his 30-year conviction that a good

potter grants priority to the demands of utility over formal ca-

prices; that, in fact, the unique expressive power of a vessel ulti-

mately begins with the potter’s attention to its practical purpose.

If this focus diminishes the vessel’s immediate capacity as a vehicle

for personal content, it compensates by elevating the vessel to the

level of the universal, the collective ground on which the personal

acquires a comparative value.

The confirmation of this conviction has, for Simon, come

more than once from the testimony of historical vessels, utilitar-

ian objects from the past that seem to have anticipated formal

aspects of his own works in the present. In the late 1980s, for

example, while leafing through a book on pottery from an ar-

chaeological excavation in Kurdistan, he was struck by the simi-

larities between some of those ancient lidded pots and his own

recent covered jars. The parallels were not the result of direct

influence, nor could they be attributed to the shared cultural or

historical conditions that normally account for stylistic confor-

mity. Simple coincidence on the one hand, or anything so com-

plicated as a collective unconscious on the other, seemed less

likely explanations than the possibility that concern for utilitarian

effectiveness had led both ancient and modern potters to identical

aesthetic choices. “It was like looking into a mirror,” Simon

remembers. “I saw pots in the book like those that I was making,

and I felt that the concerns had to be very much the same.”

Far from disappointed by the discovery that some significant

formal aspects of his work were not strictly original, Simon was

fascinated by the idea that a pot could serve so overtly as a link

between the past and present, apparently confirming the existence

of something continuous about humanity across the ages. He

studied the ancient examples and even borrowed a few of their

Between the Universal and the Personal

by Glen R. Brown

“Oval Plate with Yellow Bird,” 11 inches (28 centimeters) in length,

stoneware, with wax-resist decoration and inlaid black stain, salt fired.

“Persian Jar with Yellow Bird,” 6 inches (15 centimeters)

in height, handbuilt stoneware with resist decoration.

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“Three-Legged Vase with Woven Pattern,” 11 inches (28 centimeters) in height, stoneware with slip, resist decoration and black stain, salt fired.

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characteristics, noting in the process that certain

traits of his own work were not present in the earlier

pieces. These elements consequently acquired sig-

nificance as the marks of individuality rendered

clearer by contrast with those aspects of the pots that

appeared historically consistent. The ensuing dia-logue between the personal and the universal—car-

ried on with the subtlety characteristic of all aspects

of his work—became the basis for what Simon be-

gan to call his “Persian Jars.” In these works, utility

ironically takes on a conceptual importance, perhaps

even surpassing that of its practical role. Use serves

as a means to the universal, which in turn gives

greater definition to the personal elements of style.

The “Persian Jars” have built upon an affinity for

covered forms that Simon has felt since his student

days at the University of Minnesota. In the early

1970s, much of his production was devoted to whathe called “country crockery,” simple thrown cylin-

drical forms with broad slab lids. The formal prob-

lems that he set for himself in this series consisted

primarily of devising lids that were integral to the

overall piece rather than merely appendages to it.

This concern eventually led him to explore off-round

shapes, forms thrown on the wheel but altered, espe-

cially into a squared format. In 1976, after working

out the problems of throwing vessels and lids sepa-

rately and still achieving a perfect fit after alteration,

he began in earnest a series of small square boxes.

The innovation in form proved unexpectedly significant to the development of surface decora-

tion, another element central to his subsequent work.

“I was able to come to terms with the surface rather

than just pouring glaze over it,” he recalls. “I had

found it hard to work with the round shape, since

there was no beginning and no end. The panels of

the squared forms helped me.”

Since 1980, when he began salt firing his work,

Simon has limited his glazes to two: an iron-satu-

rated glaze that fires a dark greenish brown and a

gray Shino that appears white when applied over a

light ground. The latter is used primarily for the

interior surface of open forms, such as cups or ves-

sels, and the former for the interior surface of cov-

ered pieces—although Simon also employs it

sparingly on exterior surfaces, where reaction with

the salt causes it to appear yellow. The majority of

the exterior decoration is, however, rendered through

“Three-Legged Vase with Black Slot,”

11 inches (28 centimeters) in height,

stoneware with black stain, salt fired.

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the application of stains, nonmelting pigments that can be relied

upon to remain relatively stationary against a slip background. Of

the slips, one is white and tends to mix heavily with the salt,

acquiring a distinctive smoothness and sheen. The other, a Geor-

gia kaolin, produces a warm yellow matt finish. Each provides an

ideal contrast to the commercially prepared black stain with whichhe renders the motifs.

A thin line, brittle and slightly tremulous, imparts to some of

Simon’s surfaces an appealingly tentative, exploratory appearance.

The process through which he achieves this effect, however, is not

really as extemporaneous as it seems. His frequently employed

yellow bird motif, for example, appears to have been loosely

delineated with a thin, dry brush, when in fact it is rather pre-

cisely rendered through a resist technique. Working from a simple

sketch, Simon waxes around the desired bird shape, then brushes

some arcs of the yellow-firing, iron-saturated glaze into the posi-

tive space. After applying more wax to coat the entire surface, he

wields a thin blade to incise the contours of the form, which arethen filled with the black stain. The process creates subtle effects

that he particularly admires, and he now

employs it to render all of his motifs. “I’ve

been using the resist for about four years,”

he explains. “The wax is really great be-

cause it isn’t perfect. It leaves little traces at

the edges of the lines that make the image

resemble a woodblock print. It’s really beau-

tiful.” The effect is further softened by the

fact that the salt causes the heavy oxide to

blush slightly in adjoining areas.

Although many of Simon’s characteris-tic motifs are representations of natural

forms—birds, fish, horses, trees—they are

neither invested with a deliberate symbolic

content nor charged with a narrative func-

tion. Rather, they serve as the basis for

exploration of two-dimensional form and

the means of articulating it. One of the

earliest of these motifs was the fish, which

was rendered with enough regularity in his

work to constitute a kind of signature. By

loading a watercolor brush and laying out

the point, Simon indicated the fish’s nose.

Then, in a single stroke, he moved across

the pot to define the body and, with a final

upward sweep, the tail. “It was recogniz-

able and somewhat engaging,” he asserts,

“but it was not emotional. The bird is the

same. It works well as a form, so I use it.

I’ve never wanted to get too involved with the little creatures on

my pots.” He prefers, in fact, to think of them as patterns rather

than representations and, indeed, many of the motifs are essen-

tially fields of cross-hatching.

The horse, a simple shape created from black stain using the

wax-resist technique, is a good example of an element that is more

a decorative form than a representation. It resulted, in fact,

specifically from consideration of the surfaces of a particular

pot—a round jar with legs cut from the foot that Simon had

adopted from Warren MacKenzie while a student in Minnesota.His anecdote of how the horse unexpectedly revealed itself as a

design possesses all the magic of Kandinsky’s famous description

of the epiphany prompting his breakthrough to nonobjective

painting. “I had been making that pot shape for about a year,”

Simon recalls. “I distinctly remember leaving the studio one night

and looking back at the pots. One of those jars was sitting on the

edge of the table and I saw the belly of a horse where the line had

been cut to create the feet. I had never thought about a horse

before. I later worked out the rest of the horse using the line of the

belly of the pot and found that the form had held the horse before

I realized it. That’s a beautiful way for it to happen.”

Undoubtedly, many similar stories have circulated among pot-ters across the millennia, as experiences of aesthetic revelation are

“Persian Jar with Dog,” 5 inches (13 centimeters) in height,

stoneware with white slip and wax-resisted black stain.

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a consequence of devoting attention first to tradition—in the case

of pottery, a tradition founded on the concern for utility. The

function of the vessel as a tool is inseparable from a visual effect,

regardless of whether that effect is appealing, unpleasant or aes-

thetically neutral. As potters have tended to seek visually engaging

rather than alienating form, if for no other reason than to make

their works desirable to consumers, they have continuously con-fronted the task of drawing aesthetic consequences from forms

that owe their first allegiance to use. In this process, technique has

a dual role. It serves first to ensure a uniform efficiency of design,

both within pieces and between them, and second to develop that

design into something that functions effectively in visual terms.

Technique, in other words, can be an important bridge between

the persuasion of tradition and the impulse toward exploration.

This is certainly true in the case of Simon’s recent tripod vases,

tall and graceful vessels that nevertheless impart the impression of

strength. Achieving this balance of qualities involved, on the one

hand, the exercise of a carving technique that he had developed

previously in a series of bowls, and, on the other, a susceptibility

to the subtle influence of vessels that he had seen decades earlier

and largely forgotten. To produce the vase, he begins by throwing

a tall and narrow form with thick walls. After the clay has become

somewhat firm, he squeezes it into a vessel shape that appears

triangular in cross section. Setting the blade of a knife at one of

the corners of the rim, he slices downward all the way to the base,

creating a bevel. An identical slice from the opposite corner

matches this so that the final result is of two planes converging

outward where the surface had formerly been flat. In cross-sec-

tion, the vessel is transformed from a triangle to a hexagon.

The resulting form has acquired

various surface patterns, including

a cross-hatch rendered from a mesh

of fine wax-resist lines and an ir-

regular geometric shape—what

Simon calls a “slot,” which initially

derived from a dark doorway motif.

The formal elements of the vases

are distinctive, but nonetheless part

of an evolving aesthetic. “For a while, the shape was like a torpedo,”

Simon recalls. “Some people called

it a nuclear plant. It had wide legs

and tapered up to an opening. In

the last year or two, I’ve started to

work with it more as a torso shape. It has that look because I’ve

given it a little waist.”

Recently, Simon has discovered another form to which his

vases can be closely compared, one that is especially appealing as

an analogy since it suggests an additional connection to tradition

in his work. While looking through some images of ancient

Chinese art, he came across a bronze ewer that was nearly identi-cal in profile to his vases. If, as Simon suspects, the similarity can

be partly explained as the consequence of unconscious memories

of a field trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art 30 years ago, it is

nonetheless significant that the aptness of the form only occurred

to him in the actual process of potting—of developing a vessel

with both aesthetics and the requisites of utility in mind.

It has often been said that potters are the best judges of pots. If

this is so, the reason may well be that the potter views the pot not

as a meaningless lump of clay that has been transformed by a

unique identity, a purely original expression, but rather as a

careful reconciliation of the universal and the personal. The de-

mands of use have historically provided the context in which

pots, including those willfully negating utility, have acquired

their most complex meanings. For Simon, to view a pot exclu-

sively in terms of aesthetics is to alienate it from the past. The

initial concern for utility—and not just for vases, bowls or teapots

as abstract forms—is the unifying factor of the ceramics tradi-

tion, the common point of departure for individual expression.

The author A frequent contributor to Ceramics Monthly, Glen R.

Brown is an associate professor of art history at Kansas State Univer-

sity in Manhattan.

“Round Three-Legged Jar with Black

Horse,” 12 inches (30 centimeters)

in height, stoneware with slip and resisted

black stain, salt fired, by Michael Simon,

Colbert, Georgia.

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