Eva Zeisel at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, with a piece from a porcelain table service introduced in 1946; behind her is a chair she designed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/arts/design/eva-zeisel-ceramic-artist-and-designer-dies-at-105.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all
Look at this woman's face; kindness, wisdom and clarity, with a bit of the little girl thrown in. Rest in Peace, Eva Zeisel, the master of ceramics dies today at 105.
Read about her, she is a unique and inspirational woman.
And Ruth Duckworth, another inspiration. She was the woman who said if you want to be an artist, you cannot have a husband.
I may be in Pittenweem, but I am reading the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Scotsman, and of course, the Daily Mail.co.uk.
Ruth Duckworth
Free-thinking sculptor-potter inspired by the abstracted forms of nature
The sculptor-potter Ruth Duckworth, who has died aged 90, shaped new ways of thinking about ceramics in the second half of the 20th century. Approaching clay as a sculptor rather than as a potter, she brought an aesthetic rigour to her refined vessel forms, figurative sculptures and installations, which range in size from a few inches to breathtakingly large, site-specific commissions.
In both her life and work, Duck-worth's background was one of non-conformity. In Germany, as a young girl, she risked prosecution by defacing a Nazi monument and resented being unable to attend art school because her father was Jewish. Most challenging of all was her determination to gain international respectability as a sculptor working primarily in clay.
Born Ruth Windmüller in Hamburg, the youngest of five children, she came to Liverpool in 1936 as a refugee from the Nazi regime to join her sister Renate, and study at Liverpool art school. Lively and questioning, Duckworth found formal academic teaching stultifying, but nevertheless it confirmed her love of, and aptitude for, sculpture. She was fascinated by performance and art, and for two years toured with a puppet theatre where she carved heads in an expressionist style. Following second world war work in a munitions factory, she moved to London where she met the sculptor and designer Aidron Duckworth, whom she married in 1949. Determined to work as a sculptor, she produced gravestones, though she had an early success when commissioned to carve in low relief the 14 stations of the cross for a church in New Malden, Surrey.
A change in direction came in the mid-1950s when she became fascinated with clay and ceramics. On the advice of a fellow refugee, the potter Lucie Rie, she studied pottery at Hammersmith art school, but again found the teaching too restrictive and rapidly moved to the Central School of Art and Crafts, where she responded to the more enlightened, experimental atmosphere. She later taught at the school.
In the late 1950s the Duckworths built a modernist house in Kew, south-west London, where she had her own studio producing both functional ware and individual vessels. With clean, minimal shapes, the tableware was very different from the prevailing taste for reduction-fired stoneware advocated by luminaries such as Bernard Leach. By contrast, the hand-built, coiled, often asymmetrical, totemic forms, covered with dry, crusty glazes, were partly derived from the abstracted forms of nature, a concern that became a recurring theme in her work.
Duckworth felt that she was making little progress in London, and so the offer of a year's teaching at the University of Chicago's Midway studios seemed an ideal opportunity to rethink. Apart from short periods, she was to remain in Chicago, eventually acquiring an old pickle factory, which served as home and studio, until her death. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1967.
In Chicago, tableware was abandoned in favour of one-off pieces and public commissions. The first significant breakthrough was for a 400 sq ft stoneware mural Earth Water and Sky, a massive project covering four walls and the ceiling at the geophysical sciences building of the university. With its broad, flowing interpretation of nature, the work suggested the ebb and flow of the natural world. Later came Clouds Over Lake Michigan for the Dresdner bank, in the Board of Trade Building in Chicago. The vast, sweeping surfaces, inspired by meteorological and geological themes, again demonstrated her abstract interpretation of nature.
Alongside large-scale public works, Duckworth created smaller, more intimate pieces that included abstract wall panels in stoneware and vessel-based forms in white, unglazed porcelain. One series, the cup and blade group, not only sensitively highlights the translucency and delicacy of the material, but also creates a satisfying balance between shape, proportion and space.
Usually around 6in tall, these modest sculptures can be seen as metaphors for relationships, the couplings and interaction between the two shapes – one rounded and hollow, the other a finely wrought slab – seeming to cut into, but to be an intrinsic part of the other. Tabletop figures have the same, sure sense of abstracted form and surface.
Fascinated by scale, Duckworth became intrigued by the stylised, figurative sculptures of ancient Egypt. Her larger-than-life-sized sculptures reflect influences from Henry Moore, who had encouraged her in the early 1950s, and were made in bronze, smaller ones in porcelain.
Diminutive in height, with sharp, bright, piercing eyes, Duckworth saw herself primarily as an artist rather than a theoretician, rarely writing about her work, though she would discuss it with insight. "Form," she said, "is what matters to me in any material", a concern that she explored by avoiding sentiment and nostalgia – qualities often associated with clay – and by honing and refining to allow the shape and surface to tell its own story. Her quiet but powerful presence could seem daunting but, after an initial reserve, she was a generous and warm personality.
Although represented from time to time in mixed exhibitions in the UK, many organised by Henry Rothschild, she had a major retrospective earlier this year at the Ruthin craft centre in north Wales, which provided an opportunity to see a full range of her work. She enjoyed being in the UK so much that, on her return to Chicago, she put her house and studio on the market, determined to move back permanently.
Duckworth is survived by her sister, Ilse Windmüller, as well as her nephew Peter, whom she and Aidron adopted as their son after the death of his mother, another of Ruth's sisters.
• Ruth Duckworth, sculptor, born 10 April 1919; died 18 October 2009
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