The following interview
with Bennett Bean by Pat Malarcher is reprinted by permission of Surface
Design Journal, volume 22, number 3, Spring 1998.
Interview:
Bennett Bean
Bennett Bean is a ceramic artist whose painted and gilded pots are quintessential examples of three-dimensional surface design. Bean works with an accumulative process that he says involves fifteen steps. His vessels are wheel thrown, dented, trimmed, burnished, cut and assembled, dried, painted with white terra sigillata, burnished, biscuit fired, drawn with tape, partially coated with wax resist, partially glazed, pit fired, gold leafed, in-painted with acrylic and covered with a coat of clear protective urethane.1
Bean's work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as internationally, and is represented in the collections of The Carnegie Museum, The Cincinnati Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Newark Museum, The Royal Ontario Museum, The Renwick Gallery, The St. Louis Art Museum, and others.
Bean's fascination with pattern overlaps with similar interests held by many fiber artists. Last fall he agreed to talk with Patricia Malarcher, SDA Editor, about his new venture into rug design as well as his ongoing explorations of pattern in the third dimension.
You spoke of being excited about the way the patterns on your pots
change as they move around the surfaces of the forms. Could you elaborate
on that?
That was something that evolved. The original idea was to have almost
the same design all around a pot. The earliest pieces were divided horizontally
and design would continue all around the piece. That's the traditional
overall pattern. What began to develop was the idea that you can't know
what's on the back of a piece unless it is moved. Taking that further
you can change perception by changing the motif. As time went on the pieces
really began to change - the motifs moved around them so that one side
would look one way and one side another way. As a result the pieces became
much more complex and sometimes would feel completely different from front
to back.
When you change a motif as you move around a piece are you concerned
about how the parts will work together?
Basically I think of the pairs and triples as two-sided so I make this
side, then that, then usually tie the ends together.
But aren't the patterns related to one another?
Yes, here you have a composition and a lot of it has to do with the in
and out character of the pot. The earlier pieces were in the round and
you had to go over the top to get inside. Now, with slices all the way
down the side it's as if the piece is opening, allowing you to move in
and out as you move around it. A lot of the decoration has a sense of
emerging from the interior or disappearing into the interior. It has a
lot to do with complexity. Every time you add an element, you add complexity.
One of the things about flat vs. round is that round is more complex because
you can't have the whole thing in front of you. There's always the other
side, always unfolding; it's not a finished experience.
But still, the unfolding is sequential. Don't you have to think of
that?
I used to think about going around the pot like a Chinese landscape scroll
that unfolded as you move from place to place. You're not sure how it's
going to turn out until you unroll the next section, but there's a transition
from shape to shape and form to form. When these are first decorated in
black and white I don't even think of color. Originally I thought of pattern;
now I think of the flow of images as they move around.
How would you describe your work stylistically?
These pieces are formalist. They're not about stories, there is no recognizable
imagery; they're about the relationship of shapes, and how those shapes
lead one to another and how they relate to the outside of the pot as well
as to the inside, one side moving into another.
The way you talk about relationships of shapes on the surface sounds
more like painting than ceramics.
If you look at the earlier motifs, you'll see that the taped decorative
elements are tiny. Then they began to expand because the larger the motif
the more painting is done, and the more painting is done, the more control
I have. Ceramics is an iffy business - you don't know what you're going
to get when it comes out of the kiln. What I've developed is a way to
get the last word, in a decorative sense, by this painting process.
Even though the pieces are about formal relationships, you have developed
a certain set of motifs. Where do they come from?
It's a vocabulary. I started out, 20 years ago, with a body of work, and
I had five motifs. I added one every two months - in a year I had 17.
Then, in 20 years I had 100 so there's this great basket of motifs. Some
remain interesting; some of them appear and disappear. One motif was generated
from watching my wife's computer with that linear screen saver bouncing
around. It appeared on my pots for a while and I suddenly noticed it's
not there. Then I was reading a book by Robert Hughes on Australia, where
people where whipping each other, and I started doing little whiplike
devices. Those faded out rather quickly, so things come, things go.
What are you working with now?
Right now I'm completely enmeshed in this big curlicue. The one with the
thin curving lines is the inside of the larger spiral. When you cut the
big spiral out of contact paper, this is what's left. You've got the same
element, but a permutation of it. Your perceptive mechanism makes these
two things relate. One being a reverse of the other ties them together.
A spiral is a universal motif, but you also use things that are more
individual, like these little shapes that look like two-headed golf tees.
On some pieces there is a shape like a human eye. Those little pieces
are what you have left when you cut out the eye. I was brought up in the
California ceramics world; we all thought we were Japanese, and part of
that ethic is that you need to be completely aware of your visual environment.
If you're looking at all the steps of the process, then scrap elements,
the mistakes, those can generate as many ideas as the things you consciously
do. There's a sense of awareness that flows through the process that keeps
you alert to that. A lot of the evolution in my work takes place in seeing
what's there.
What are some other examples of that approach?
It happens in the computer generated pieces - if there's this, what if
we do that, and then you construct an image. That's done much more in
surface design than in ceramics because ceramics in most cases still has
a single image as a decorative motif. You choose one and the pot gets
that. It's changed to some degree but when I grew up it was the Japanese
tradition of a single floated painted motif with a Japanese brush. A lot
of this taping technique had to do with getting away from the tyranny
of the Japanese brush. Then I couldn't put a mark on a pot without having
it look oriental; this present work is definitely generated out of another
universe.
Would you say that a motif serves you as a kind of personal brushstroke?
It's a decorative element that is not generated with the kind of associative
values that a brushstroke has. This is my response to figuring out a way
of making that is appropriate in the world I live in. I'm involved in
decoration - I'm an embellisher with a kind of Pavlovian response to surface.
It also had to do with a stage in my life during which I had specific
fixed ideas external to process. As a result of that I made a lot of work
that I just didn't like making. I liked the idea, but the process of making
it was not compatible with my particular neuroses. My present work is
totally pleasant to make. The only thing that's seriously boring is the
gilding on the inside because there's only one decision: what color gold?
Somebody else can do that and luckily I have somebody with abiding patience.
How did the gilding enter your work?
In the earlier pieces I'd been painting the interior black. When I opened
up some of those pieces, all of a sudden I had a surface inside and surface
outside. I chose gold because when it's used on the inside it reads as
space - it has a sense of indeterminate surface. The other interesting
characteristic is that gold has color but it isn't a color - it's a material.
Therefore it will do with any color. I use a dozen to 20 golds but they're
all in that family and they all are compatible with what's on the outside.
The gilding suggests cultural associations - I'm reminded of Asian
textiles.
And Japanese screens. I think the human creature is genetically coded
to react to gold. Every culture has it. In part that's because it's malleable,
soft, and easy to get. But we've kept using it because of how we react
to it. There are associations, and almost a physical response to it. It's
warm, it's delicious. A lot of what I'm dealing with in these pieces is
beauty. Beautiful as a rule is not as powerful as sex and violence so
you have to make pieces that are seductive enough to compete with sex
and violence. A lot of the richness that develops here is about that sense.
All the time I feel that I'm pushing it farther.
The beauty part?
The beauty part and the complexity part. The beauty part gets you and
the complexity holds you. There is content here, but the beauty is the
initial attraction. Then when you begin to try and to undo this thing
in your mind, you find it is immensely complex.
What do you mean when you talk about content?
Formalist content. This related to that relates to that. This generates
certain psychological responses. In these pieces with gold inside and
black at the base there's a hierarchy that moves up and in.
I see what you mean - those markings from the fire are incredibly
primitive in relation to the gold.
There's organic against geometric, the vibration between all of that linear
geometry and all this organic churning below. The process is very technically
involved with lots and lots of steps. Every one leaves evidence so what
you see at the end is the accumulation of all that evidence.
How do you manage to get by with a commitment to beauty as an art
value?
The art mainstream has moved away from beauty and is into objects embodying
[social or political] content or situations involving [that kind of] content
so I'm left way behind. I am not in the art world. I am in a world where
the paradigm object is the vessel. These are vessels, and that's the edge
of the playing field for me. A great deal of contemporary craft is a misguided
attempt to run after the look of art without the philosophy of art. As
a result you get ten-year-after derivative objects. There is a problem
in the craft world of a desperate attempt to become art. It seems to me
that the universe where you can actually do something peculiar to that
craft world, at least in ceramics and glass, is the vessel.
How has the vessel held your interest for such a long time?
A lot of the ideas I have are out of the period when I began; I am of
that period. You only make about three discoveries, ideas that are really
your own, in you life, but if you have the good fortune to be an artist,
you can continue to embellish and develop those ideas. There are still
a lot of people who want to live with beautiful things, and luckily there
are enough of them so that I get to make more of these pots.
You've talked about motifs that are inspired by your studio environment.
But you live in the countryside where you're also surrounded by nature.
Is that a source of ideas?
There's a series of forms that I'm making called the "drunken lilies."
The total shape comes directly out of flowers. It also comes from the
question of how to make a stirrup cup. That's a traditional form that's
been done forever but the early ones were shaped like cones and then they
became much more open and floral.
What attracted you to the spiral?
The first spiral I ever saw and reacted to came from a piece of jewelry
I bought my wife in the '60s. Is was an interpretation of that Indian
spiral with a hand on the end. I've always loved that - you get something
like that in your mind and 20 years later you say, "now I can use
it."
You use a lot of different colors, but there's still a distinctive
quality of color in a Bennett Bean pot.
I have to bring color to a level of intensity so that it vibrates. I'll
push it until it feels right. Color is not very analytical or conscious
with me, but clearly those reds have a lot of oomph.
Do you think about color in relation to the scale of a pattern?
No, but the scale of the motif is clearly related to the size of the piece.
You get an entirely different piece if you change the size of the motif.
There is an interesting moment when you get a motif that is totally right
for the shape. Then there's a sense of monumentality about it - you can't
figure out the scale from a photograph.
Do you ever mix different sizes of the same motif in a single piece?
I did one with different sized spirals, and another with different sizes
of eyes. I'm playing with it but I'm not there yet. The wonderful thing
is that I have a long way to go with this and I'm not in a hurry to get
there. I want to explore the area I'm in instead of rushing to the end,
so there are a batch of things I'm interested in exploring, but not yet.
Have your discoveries regarding motifs led to changes in the shapes
of your vessels?
I don't think so. When I work I'm doing only what I'm doing - when I'm
throwing, when I'm putting on slip, when I'm decorating with pattern and
glaze.
Let's talk about your two-dimensional work.
It started with the idea that I wanted to make rugs, and thinking, how
can I do this. Then I thought if I'm going to live in this century I'd
better join up. So I talked to a friend and then said, maybe I'll have
a web sits. She said, here's what you need. When I got that stuff and
began to experiment, it became clear to me that I didn't want to sit down
and learn a lot of programs so I brought in someone who knew how to use
them. We started to experiment first with rugs coming out of traditional
Tibetan motifs - a kind of simple checkerboard.
What you're doing now is a long way from those simple squares.
I had the idea of making a web site with this floating image of a pot,
but it became a little boring. Then it looked like the computer had characteristics
that I could explore - it could make all the squares for me, instead of
my drawing them. So we started there, and then I was taking the motifs
from my pots and cutting them out from blank pieces of paper, then scanning
them into the computer and starting to build rug designs from those. Then
we began to do directly to the pots, scanning in the images of motifs
from them. The logical thing on a rug is a pattern, but when we put the
images from the pots together it completely veered away from where I thought
I was going. We were suddenly into overall pattern that was far to complex
for the wavers in Nepal I hope to find. So that led to asking if I want
to do overall patterns, and if so the logical place to put overall patterns
is on the wallpaper or fabric. But wouldn't it be simpler and more direct
and faster if I made them into prints? As they went toward prints they
left overall pattern and became compositional.
It sounds as if the computer has opened up new ways of thinking for
you.
The characteristics of the computer are such that you can take something
that you would flee from having to draw. The computer can do it just like
that, so it allows a different sensibility to begin to develop. I'm trying
to look at the computer in relation to its own characteristics and begin
to push them.
What are those characteristics?
One of the things a computer can do is duplicate immensely complex things
over and over, with no labor on your part except a little punch. It will
repeat endlessly and it will change scale. You can take an image that's
one size and drop it down, so you can deal with the scale of motif and
the relationship with other motifs. For me the most intriguing thing about
computer generated images is that I've taken the pots, scanned them in,
constructed flat prints out of them. And now I'm looking back at the pots
and seeing how much of their motifs and how much of their construction
grows out of the technical characteristics of making them. You cut, tape,
glaze, paint - work of the hand - whereas this frees you from that kind
of labor. It's exciting to see the possibilities.
Of course when you speak of scanning in pots, you mean scanning in
pictures of pots. Since there's perspective in the photographs you use,
the shapes and motifs taken from dimensional surfaces don't look like
flat designs.
That's quite interesting - they're volumetric, but only across the width
of the pot so you get this shallow, almost quilted sense of space.
Yes. And when you move the pattern units around on the screen the
resulting design is very quilt-like. Let's go back to something you mentioned
before - the shift from pattern to composition.
An overall pattern goes on forever with no demarcation. If you take that
image and begin to compose in relationship to an edge, then you have the
characteristics that have always been associated with painting; making
compositions is related to the rectangle. I realized that I was in a patterned
universe and I needed to be in a print universe. Every activity has rules.
If you break up pattern it becomes endless variation, it's no longer pattern
unless you have variations on motifs that keep on going. If you make a
pattern more complex by breaking it up, you keep trying to figure it out
because the eye looks for pattern. The point at which these prints become
successful is the point at which you can't establish a pattern.
Are you saying that a composition keeps the eye endlessly searching?
It won't be successful in its search to find pattern, but it will be successful
in its search to find relationships. We're still finding patterns and
we have to destroy those if we're going to get to prints.
With the rugs, are you going in the direction of pattern or composition?
If you're moving toward composition, you have to think of looking down
at something horizontal, not looking at something vertical on a wall.
The problem is not so much in looking down. It's that you don't want people
to be frightened. What you get away with on the wall is one thing, what
happens on the floor is another: Rugs have rules.
What distinguishes the rules for rugs and those for painting?
Vibrating and writhing and punching in and out of space is great in a
painting, but on the floor you'd worry about walking on something that
looks like it might rise up your ankle, or as if you'd step in a hole.
A new agenda is to go back, carry the kind of complexity I've got, but
lay it down, flatten it out, and simplify it.
Do you think rug design offers enough complexity to hold your interest?
We'll find out.
What else can you say about where you are now?
At 57, I realize I'm finite - there's only so much I can do. But I have
a mind that rattles around like a bucketful of bolts with ideas flipping
out all the time. Art is the way you make ideas appear in the world, and
the computer is a great tool to do that. Everyone thinks art is about
handmaking, but it's no more that than when you're making a novel by typing
it out. In pots and rugs and those things you get a lot more feedback
form process than you do in typing, but basically it's ideas we're talking
about. When I'm looking at my mortality, I'm thinking, boy, do I have
a lot of ideas. How can I get enough of those out there without making
them myself? I'm making about 100 pieces a year; I can't make any more
and remain a sane human being, and keep the joy involved in making these.
Reprinted by permission of Surface Design Journal, volume 22, number
3, Spring 1998
1. Leaning into the Wind; Ceramic Works by Bennett Bean, The Arkansas Arts Center, Decorative Arts Museum, Little
Reprinted
by permission of Surface Design Journal,
volume 22, number 3, Spring 1998.
 |
Untitled
(Triple Series, front and back views), 1996
|
Bennett
Bean
357 Route 661
Blairstown, New Jersey 07825
bennettbean@bennettbean.com
© Bennett Bean, 1990 - 2004