Clarice Cliff's Influence On My Tea Pot

To this very day, Clarice Cliff, is known as one of the most influential ceramic artists of the 20th century. She is known worldwide in the area of art; her work is collected, valued, and admired throughout many countries. She was born on the 20th of January in 1899 in Tunstall, and died at the ripe old age of 73 on the 23rd of October, 1972. At the age of thirteen, Cliff started work in ‘The Potteries,’ this was the year she discovered her love for designing pots. Her art has influenced many around the world, including mine, the photograph shown in the next paragraph was one of her many pieces that has influenced my own teapot.
The artist has not influenced my teapot hugely, mainly because I had to put my own ideas into it, although her pots …show more content…
You will straight away notice the bright colours used, there are no dark toned colours, this symbolises that it is a ‘happy’ teapot. This could have meant that during Cliff’s time of producing this wonderful creation she went through a bright stage in her life that she was obviously very happy with, although if you research a lot of her pieces you will notice that Cliff has always used bright colours in practically all of her artwork, this could have meant that during her lifetime she never had anything bad happen to her which then had a positive impact on her artwork. As mentioned before this pot looks as if it could have been created sometime this generation, to me it has this modern look to it; I think this is what attracted me to it. The pattern drawn onto it by Cliff herself has a sort of elegant look to it; it is plain and simple yet effective. You can see that it is a bunch of flowers and long bits of grass drawn onto the one side of the teapot; I would have used this design although I have to create a building like teapot so therefore it does not fit into my category. An important thing that I should add is the name of this teapot, Clarice Cliff later on decided she would call it “Umbrellas and Rain,” to me this is quite an unusual name to call it, I don’t really see where this name fits into it, there has been no rain drawn onto the pot and I don’t really quite …show more content…
Cliff was the daughter of both Harry Thomas Cliff and Ann Machin; she grew up alongside her two brothers and five sisters. Clarice attended schooling in Tunstall up until the age of thirteen. Her first job was at Linguard Webster and Co where she was apprenticed as an ‘enameller’ where she learned freehand painting. After 3 years Cliff moved to work as a lithographer at Hollinshead and Kirkham. Clarice Cliff started attending evening classes and in the year of 1916 she decided to join A J Wilkinson’s Royal Staffordshire Pottery which was in Burslem. Then years on, 1957, Clarice Cliff, decided to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art, which was located in London, and then she set herself up in her own studio adjoining the Newport Pottery. The advantages of owning her own studio was that she got to experiment with her own designs that included brightly coloured geometric patterns and shapes, these early designs were called, the now infamous, ‘Bizarre Ware.’ Throughout her whole lifetime Clarice Cliff experienced many new things; she gained more potential in her pottery and strived to achieve excellence in all areas of her