Poole Pottery 1960-1980 Part Two

Andree Fontana?

I had considered an A Dan, Pamela Bevans seemed more likely, but maybe not.
Maybe they'ed all been down the pub at lunchtime...

the magnolia glaze sent the Poole stamp blue which often fools non - Poolies into thinking they have an early 1960's pot.

It might be Diana Davis. It is not like the early 60's magnolia glaze, sometime in the mid-seventies they used this dirty pink magnolia glaze on the backs - maybe it was old stock or bought in cheap. The colours and design tell you it is mid seventies.

I've been looking for a nice studio vase for a while and finally got myself a stunning example. Impressed and stamped TV mark - but no triangle mark. Not a bad price either.

A most unusual decoration. How's it been achieved?

Probably scratched through the reddish brown glaze with a hacksaw blade or something similar, this method of decoration is mentioned in the studio vase section of the 'pooleimages' website.

wow, that's a bit special!

Yes, a very nice piece.

I was the under-bidder and opted not to go higher as I doubt I'll be coming over to the UK this summer, which is when I would have picked it up. All flights have been cancelled until further notice.

I was prepared to bid higher, it seems that people don't want to commit to big purchases of non-essential items right now - a beautiful pot is always essential.

Does anyone know how the glaze effect was achieved on this 40cm Studio charger? I haven't seen this used on other Poole Studio pieces.

The pale glazes stand proud with a very defined, almost sharp edge from the white body. It feels as though the glazes were scraped away with a metal spatula after being painted on, or maybe some kind of 'template' was applied - paper?- then removed after the design was painted.

It has a TM monogram for Tony Morris and bears the TV mark. I've put it next to a couple of 5" TV mark dishes as a colour comparison.

wax or latex resist?

When the catalogue was online it looked a bit unusual but photos often only give half the info and are never very good at showing textures. Your second pic looks like the white is composed of slip thus giving it the height. Its definately more interesting than the original photos implied.

dantheman wrote:wax or latex resist?

I've a couple of wax resist Poole Studio pieces and they are different from this one. The edge of the glaze is smooth or rounded where it meets the wax.

How would latex be applied to the body?

ppcollectables wrote:Your second pic looks like the white is composed of slip thus giving it the height.

I think that's an optical illusion - the white areas are lower and not raised, like slip usually is.

If you look at small pieces of glaze in the design, you should see that the edges of blue and brown are well defined.

Here are a few more snaps taken under artificial light. I'll take some more in the morning which should better show how the edges of the blue/brown glazed design are sharply defined...

Could there have been some shallow carving and then filling with glaze.

The blue circles in the first pic look to be tube-lined.
However it was done, it looks like it was a lot of work.

ppcollectables wrote:Could there have been some shallow carving and then filling with glaze.

Having slept on it, I don't think this is glaze: it's all slip. That explains why the colours are so muted.

I still can't work out how the pattern was formed -- if Tony cut the slip with a metal tool or if the slip was applied onto a 'template' of paper or whatever.

As I understand the term, slip is liquid clay and liquids are not ideal for creating such defined edging (I'm heavily leaning on my own experiences with icing cakes here, so please forgive anything blatantly stupid I might say).
If I wanted to achieve a similar effect on a cake the simplest way - albeit a very labour intensive one - would be to make up a batch of white fondant ice, split it into however many colours I'd need for the design and colour each portion accordingly. Then it would be a 'simple' matter of rolling it out flat and cutting, tearing or otherwise shape the pieces and build the design in layers.

Would it be possible to do similar with clay? Maybe pre-colour amounts of white clay and proceed as above, using a slip to stick the layers onto each other?

denbydump wrote:The blue circles in the first pic look to be tube-lined.
However it was dobe, it looks like it was a lot of work.

Here are a couple of photos.

You can see the raised edges of the blue and brown are not lines made my applying slip from a tube -- they seem to me to have been formed by some kind of template. The blue slip (pretty sure it is slip) seems to have some gritty substance added to it.

As you say, there must have been a lot of work and messing around to complete the design and I wonder if after this Tony decided to just do wax resist.

You and others here know more than I do about techniques: What do you think?

Now it looks more like pate-sur-pate, a technique more associated with glass making!

Maybe it was applied via a screen printing technique

Grumpy Grandad wrote:As I understand the term, slip is liquid clay and liquids are not ideal for creating such defined edging

My thinking is the slip would have gone slightly hard before the paper/polythene/thin card template was removed, thus leaving an edge that is well defined and sharp - as seen in the photos. The shapes and lines in the design seem to be cut-outs of paper, with some torn edges here and there.

Maybe even a "lost paper" technique where the paper "masks"
burn off in the kiln, Doulton slater's patent almost...