So what was the last SERIOUS piece of pottery you bought then?

Just been looking on Facebook at the Egoboo photos of people's purchases at Hatfield this weekend. People spending some serious money there!!!!
Got me wondering. Discounting the cheapo charity shops/ boot sale buys. What are the serious pots you have bought in the past year or so.. Meself I am in scaling down mode. Refining/reducing/ upcycling..... So on Ebay its been a set of Margery Clinton, a Bill Marshall vase, and a Joanna Constantinidis teapot. Then a couple of large Clive Bowen chargers from and a couple of tony Laverick early lustre pieces from Adam Partridge's. That's me downsizing! Ahem....

wait for a certain pottery fan to return from Hatfield, she may have blown a few quid

I have been seriously downsizing for 3 or 4 years, cashing in on my investment and claiming my house back from the hoard.
I will still buy 3 figure pieces when the right one is offered but I'm probably down to 2 or 3 potters unless I intend to resell immediately for a good profit.

I'm still steadily collecting. But not in that league, you are talking £500+ pots...not for me. I have a little stash of Farnham, Stig, Aldermaston, Ambleside, Sydenham etc as well as many others, but my taste is more in the £75-300 range. I'm unlikely to splash out £1000 on a piece. Not my market, too much to lose. Outside my comfort zone

My new purchases are now always funded by sales. Generally selling those who I only have a few of, and won't be collecting any more of.

if we are talking £500+ then Guy Sydenham is the only potter who can still prize that sort of wedge out of my white knuckled Yorkshire fist

22 Crawford St. wrote:I'm still steadily collecting. But not in that league, you are talking £500+ pots...not for me. I have a little stash of Farnham, Stig, Aldermaston, Ambleside, Sydenham etc as well as many others, but my taste is more in the £75-300 range. I'm unlikely to splash out £1000 on a piece. Not my market, too much to lose. Outside my comfort zone

None of my lot were in that Range! I hunt a bargain.... the Joanna Constantinidis was over £100, the Bill Marshall just under £200, the Clive Bowen chargers £125 each plus commission. Couple of hundred at most it is for me.

pp everything at shows is full whack. You were asking about top dollar buys as the facebook posts not pot - bargains.

My biggest one off spend today was a relatively small Matthew Blakely tsubo at £250, which I made a down payment for and am paying the rest in instalments. I’ll be picking it up at the Oxford Fair.
A couple of @£100 purchases - Chu-I Wu, Marcio Mattos.
The rest were mainly in the £15-£50 range. Some Geoffrey Swindell’s, a couple of Charlie Colliers, a few Ben Foskers, an Albert Montserrat glaze test pot, a hairs-fur Svend Bayer which I’d regretted not getting last year....
I’ve reserved a couple of other pieces for the Oxford fair such as a Midori Takaki mask that I’d seen in an exhibition and it hadn’t sold but she didn’t have it with her this weekend; I’ve no idea how much it is, but probably in the £100s. And I dropped a lump of wood off with David Wright which has sentimental value, and asked him to make a lid for one of his ceramic boxes. He said all the wood he uses in his pots is either found or donated.

So we are all still serious collectors in some form or another then?
The first time for many years that I have not gone to Hatfield, Art in Clay. There is always a terrific range of stuff. A very impressive cross-section of the upper-state of the ceramic art. But on the other hand prices are seriously high. Which has always tended to put me off!

I have bought a few smaller pieces over the years from these fairs but the second hand market is where I have spent 99% of my cash as in most cases you can buy the same piece for a fraction of the cost, also potters charge less if you visit them at home.

22 Crawford St. wrote:pp everything at shows is full whack. You were asking about top dollar buys as the facebook posts not pot - bargains.

I didn't actually say expensive.... Serious meaning something significant or important to oneself. As opposed to say the Jean Hampton dish or the Radford piece bought for £1 each yesterday as I liked the colouring.

By the way. Who/what is Stig? Intrigued!

I assumed he meant Lindberg

200 for the Adam and Eve Hornsea muramic.

I like the choice offered at fairs like Hatfield. I bought a lovely Charlie Collier bowl which he said had been the best item to come out of a firing a year or so ago and had been sitting on his shelf since as he didn’t really want to part with it. Now that’s not something you’re going to find on eBay, even if you’re lucky enough to find a Charlie Collier piece on there in the first place. Similarly the Mattos and Blakely pieces were top of the range in that price category. And the Chiu-I Wu piece you couldn’t get for love nor money on the secondary market, or even at a gallery for twice the price. One of the potters gave me a discount because I regularly buy from him via Facebook. And Geoffrey Swindell prices his miniature test pots for half what they sell for on eBay; I could cover the cost of my other purchases if I was mercenary enough to resell them for a quick profit. A number of pieces I bought I’d at least get my money back if not more on the secondary market. And there were plenty of pots there for £5-£15 if you just wanted a momento of the day

That is a very interesting post Naomi. Which first and foremost illustrates the gorgeous diversity of studio pottery. At places like Hatfield there is a magnificently bewildering array of quality pottery. Enough to literally take your breath away.

I think I started going at the second or third one. Probably have been to about 12 or 13 of them over the years. Yet I have not bought a great deal from them. Lovely to see, Lovely to hold, but Ouch to buy! These shows are VERY expensive places for potters to be at. What with the expenses of the shows themselves, somewhere to stay, travel, van hire....one suspects that many potters get little change out of £1000. So prices are expensive. Okay, there are the cheap and cheerful souvenir bits, but as serious buys they are not much above the level of tourist ware. Serious pieces are seriously expensive. Gallery prices. They just have to be.

The brutal truth is that apart from the very highest historical echelons of a small number of potters, prices for studio pottery on the secondary market are cheap. It is not fair to name names, and it is a very sad state of affairs. But the work of often major living potters is a fraction of what you would pay in Hatfield or most of the CPA Fairs. If you are diligent and search widely it is even more so.

I agree that with the majority of potters you’d lose money on resale; they are decorative pieces and momentos rather than ‘names’, and some you wouldn’t be able to give away for love nor money.
There are some ‘big names’, naming no names, who I do not believe will be particularly collectible by the next generation, because they are simply churning out Leach copies. Why buy a copycat when you can collect Leach itself. They will go the way of the Don Glanvilles and Harry Barclays; well made pots by nonentities

The careers of the third generation of Leach style potters and the promotion of their careers by Goldmark is worthy of a book in itself. Personally I find a fair amount of both Bernard and David Leach's work also somewhat overated . At their best they can both be sublime. But that is a relatively small proportion of their work. Their quality control was not of the best, and in particular there is a substantial amount of Bernard's work that has been on the market that is not of the highest quality. There are penalties in buying the works of 'superstars' just because they are that.

The market at present of course has left the Leach tradition somewhat in the wake of the Coper/Rie modernist one. A top Rie or Coper piece probably fetches more than 10 times what a top Bernard Leach would.

A large rectangular Shoji Hamada vase that I have been ogling for the last 30 years - owner finally sold it to me.

well done Larry, those are the sweetest buys

You lucky thing
Shoji Hamada is still on my wish list :)

Just finished paying for this year’s big buy and it arrived just in time for Christmas - Matthew Blakely via Hatfield Art in Clay

I bought this recently in a selection of pots that are for stock. However, I do tend to keep any Colin Pearson pieces these days and it has joined the collection. Around 13 inches tall ( 33 cm).

stunning!