Ephraim Faience Pottery
28 July 2010
“Passing Muster”
Five blogs a week, fifty-two weeks a year, two-and-a-half years plus. Even those who don’t write much themselves are in awe of the output, and for those who do write, the normal reaction is a rolling of the eyes, and a murmured, “Ye Gods.” But, really, it’s like any other job. If you’re truly doing what you want to do, it doesn’t seem like work at all. And one of the things that has always most intrigued me about the blogging experience is simply the things I find to write about on the Internet. Also, the fact that the only person I have to consult for permission to blog on any particular subject is me, means that I can occasionally go a bit astray from the cabinetry and furniture that is this blog site’s raison d’etre.
So, with that as introduction, I would like to turn now to one of the more intriguing companies I have come across in my many cyberspace jaunts. The first thing I got when I visited Ephraim Faience Pottery was a vocabulary lesson. I thought Ephraim Faience was, I don’t know, an Irishman, I guess, who had come to this country and began making pottery. Wrong on all counts!
Taking the names in order, Ephraim comes from a town of that name in the state of Wisconsin. One of the company’s founding partners had a family connection to Ephraim and had dreamed of one day locating a pottery firm there. Well, life moved on, and so did the partner, but the name is still there. The other part of the name is even more interesting. It turns out that faience refers to pottery or earthenware with colored opaque metallic glazes. Originally it was produced in Faenza, Italy, and over time it came to refer to earthenware pieces with or without sculpted decoration, and finished in either matte and/or shiny glazes. So, that’s the dictionary definition of Ephraim Faience Pottery, but it is certainly not that what prompted this blog.
As both a woodworker and a history buff, one of the things that really fascinates me is the Arts and Crafts Movement which took place during the last part of the Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth. Two who will always be cited in any study of Arts and Crafts are the Greene & Greene Architectural Firm that created such marvelous homes as the Gamble House in Pasadena, California and Frank Lloyd Wright and his Prairie Homes. But, really, the Arts and Crafts Movement was much deeper than that. What it sought to achieve was nothing less than a transformation of life itself. William Morris and John Ruskin wanted to get people out of the factories that were just beginning to pollute our skies and our water and our lives and get them, instead, into the making of products they designed and made themselves. It preached-and it practiced-truth to materials, traditional craftsmanship and economic reform.
Well, that was then, and this is now, and now all of the jobs are on their way to China. Well, not all of them, thank God. There are still people in this country with the courage and the integrity to stay right here and do things the right way, which brings us back to Ephraim Faience Pottery. It’s a small, independently run business whose employees are still making things, really beautiful things, by hand, things they often design themselves (because they also produce a fair number of classic designs).
The first thing that impressed me about Ephraim Faience Pottery was the pottery itself, because gorgeous doesn’t even begin to truly describe their output. As always I downloaded considerably more photos for this blog than I can actually use, but truth to tell, I could have easily downloaded pretty much their entire output. I finally had to make myself stop, because I kept saying, “Oh, wait, get this one; this one’s great!”
Later I looked around the site itself, looking for material for this blog, and learned that each piece of Ephraim Faience Pottery is made completely by hand. The potters employ a collaborative process to design and create each of their pieces. They use earthenware and stoneware clays from the Midwest to throw and sculpt the forms; they then formulate and mix the glazes and apply them to the forms. The results are nothing short of stunning, which has led, no doubt, to their claim that Ephraim Faience Pottery is the leading art pottery of the Arts and Crafts Revival, a claim that certain passes muster with me!
Joseph
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One Response to “Ephraim Faience Pottery”
July 28th, 2010 at 8:13 AM
I have taken pottery classes, but I could never in my wildest dreams create anything that spectacular!
Kat