Tuesday Rostrum discovers a `bizarre’ artist who loved orange

Clarice Cliff started working in the pottery industry at the age of 13 years and during her career as a ceramic artist, she produced eight million pieces.

Her first job was a gilder – adding gold bands on traditional and conservative Victorian crockery, she later progressed to banding (filling in the radical bands on plates), outlining and enamelling (adding in the colours within the outline).

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However, her artistic talent was soon noted and she was given her own studio adjoining the pottery factory where her task was to decorate defective pieces of glost (white) ware in her own freehand patterns. She covered the imperfections in simple patterns of triangles in a style she called `Bizarre’.

That was the name of a fascinating talk presented by pottery expert, Ricki Gray, at the June Tuesday Rostrum luncheon.

Critics panned Cliff’s conical tea set designs when they were first made in 1928 with one claiming “they are not worth the paper they are wrapped in.”

Today, that tea set would fetch about R24 000.

Mr Gray’s talk included an audio-visual presentation showing the factory in Stoke-on-Trent (Staffordshire), England where the designer worked. And he also exhibited pieces from his incredible Clarice Cliff collection.

Born in 1899 she was one of seven children and being a girl she had to leave school when she became a teenager. The factories in the area mostly employed girls to paint the pottery as their hands were smaller. Boys worked at packing the bottle-shaped kilns.

One of Cliff’s most recognised designs is the `Crocus Collection’. Her young decorator, Ethel Barrow, had to paint the pieces held upside down to get the flower’s proper shape.

As orders began flooding in for the abstract design, 20 young women painted nothing but crocus on table, tea and coffee-ware, five and a half days a week. That same technique was used from 1928 to 1964. The `Bizarre’ studio was the first in the world to allow the radio to be played while the artists worked.

It was Cliff’s ability to design patterns and also create the Art Deco shapes that distinguished her from other ceramic artists at that time. And she is credited with being the first to use vivid colours on everyday pieces of crockery from salt and pepper shakers to jugs and bowls.

In 1930 she was appointed art director to AJ Wilkinson and Newport Pottery (the adjoining factories that produced her work) and she later married one of the owners, Colley Shorter, who had the foresight to register her name and her design shapes.

The factory displayed its wares at four major trade shows which meant that she had to come up with new designs and patterns every 12 weeks.

She visited South Africa in 1933 and was so taken with the three-year-old daughter (she never had children of her own) of a Port Elizabeth stockist, that on her return to the UK she sent the little girl a miniature tea set. Werner Brothers were the only SA stockists and that tea set would fetch a pretty price these days.

The Delcia range which features poppies, pansies and citrus was specially designed for the local market and could not be bought in the UK.

She died in 1972 and following a chain of mergers Wedgwood ended up owning the Clarice Cliff name.

According to the passionate speaker he “fell in love” with Clarice Cliff when he saw a vibrant cubist vase in an antique shop and so began a lifetime of collecting her pottery which combines shape, pattern and colour. One of his most prized possessions is actually made from broken shards of her pieces which he has meticulously put together to form a frame for a hand-written letter penned by the artist.

Tuesday Rostrum’s July speaker is Jane Bedford. The luncheon meeting will be held at Mbango Valley on July 9 at 11.45am. To book contact Heather Greyling at 072 1172900. 

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