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Leaving Australia for a two month residency in Vallauris, France, was a turning point for me in my life. I had been
working for years in the country making a potters' income on the fringes of the ceramic world, let alone in an artistic and cultural 'centre of the universe'. Having recently returned from this adventure I must now look at this event in terms of a potters experience and how I report it without turning it into a travelogue. I should begin with a short background of this unique village with its connections to ceramics.
VALLAURIS
Vallauris is old by any standards. It was an area used by early potters for it's rich malleable clays and has had thousands - not hundreds - of years of lives engaged in the activities of modeling, moulding, spinning, firing and glazing pottery wares. Two thousand years ago the Romans colonized this area and, when their tenure waned, waves of successive populations came and went with eradicating plagues and re-settlements of the original village. The pottery industry continued throughout medieval times, but Vallauris' potters suffered a decline of their fortunes through the twentieth century, enduring two devastating wars and the rise of plastics, making disabling incursions into their domestic ware market. During the post war period however, there were still 60 potteries surviving in Vallauris, when a random visit by an artistic genius changed it all........
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PABLO PICASSO
It was in the mid 20th century - 1946 - that Pablo Picasso arrived in Vallauris one July day to look at a
Pottery, Flower and Perfume expo (exhibition), when he met Georges and Suzanne Ramie of the Madoura Pottery, who invited him to visit their studio. He made two small bulls and the head of a faun and the rest, as we know, is history. His return (a year later) and through the following decade of working with the Vallauris potters, changed the villages' 'traditional craft' reputation into one of exciting contemporary design. In fact, Picasso modernised ceramic art altogether.
Picasso had had fifty years of development of his own unique aesthetic, and applied this instinctively like a maestro onto ceramic surfaces. He had a diligent work ethic with his co-workers who assisted him in his explorations of what was possible, and for then, implausible new techniques in altering and combining forms, glazing, decorating and once-firing. It seemed that everything he made worked - in spite of his experimentation - and worked wonderfully. One of his co-workers and technical advisors - Jean Derval (who still creates imaginative ceramic sculpture in Vallauris today) remarked later - "It was tiresome to work besides someone who was successful at everything". Picasso remained a potter as well a painter, sculptor and printmaker, with a prodigious output, making over 4000 unique ceramic pieces until his life ended in 1973.
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"Paloma" 45 cm deep
