A Ceramic History by Edmund de Waal

1. Clay and Process
2. Pioneering Definitions 1900-1940 The Studio Pot
3. European Influences: Lucie Rie and Hans Coper
4. Art Schools: A New Ceramics?
5. Teachers: Who Taught You Then?
6. Altogether Elsewhere: Cultural Diversity and the Studio Pot
7. Painterly Surfaces?
8. Does it Pour? Function in Studio Pottery
9. Necessary Pots? Unnecessary Pots?

7. Painterly Surfaces?

There are many precursors for those who want to paint onto pottery - it is a history that goes back to the earliest Neolithic pottery. Within this century there have been fascinating moments where there have been collaborations between painters and potters. In the 1930s the Catalan potter Artigas worked with Dufy and Miro to make collaborative works, in the 1950s Picasso worked at Vallauris in the South of France to make sculptural pieces. But within studio ceramics there have been several makers who are both potters, makers of forms, and also painters: people who have integrated the processes of potting and painting without the need for intermediaries. Leach was one of these, but his attitudes to the making of pots for him to subsequently decorate raise questions as to his motivation.

Two completely different approaches are those of Alison Britton (1948-) and Alan Caiger-Smith (1930-). Alison Britton uses paint in relation to clay in a bold and innovative way. Instead of painting on top of a finished pot's surface, treating painting as applied decoration, she paints slabs of clay first in a free and dynamic gestural manner. These slabs are then folded and cut to produce vessels of acute angles and angled planes. These pots often refer to other kinds of ceramics (jugs and cups) and to architectural spaces, but instead of acting as containers for actual substances are more metaphorical. She wrote in 1982 of her work that: 'I would say that this group is concerned with the outer limits of function; where function ,or an idea of function, is crucial, but is just one ingredient in the final presence of the object, and is not its only motivation.' Though her work is clearly part of the ceramic world it is also part of a ' conversation' with the work of such artists as Braque and Ben Nicholson.

Alan Caiger-Smith is the foremost tin-glazer expert in the studio pottery world. he is both a potter and a historian of his area of expertise, writing comprehensively about lustrewares in the Hispano-Mooresque traditions. His own pottery at Aldermaston, established in 1955, has been a crucial place for the training of a generation of potters to understand the relationship between brushwork and three dimensional form. Caiger-Smith's pots derive inspiration from Near Eastern ceramics with complex patterns of calligraphic brushstrokes working against a tin-glazed white ground.

In an essay from 1981 he asked the question 'Why decorate?':