Peter Callas: Sculpture at the Edge by Dorothy Joiner is published in the current issue of
Ceramics Monthly.
In 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, southwest of Paris, near the Epte River, a tributary of the Seine. There he created a plein-air (open-air) studio where he painted for more than four decades until his death in 1926. He hung Japanese prints wall to wall in his house, planted color-saturated flowers in parallel rows of the Clos Normand (Cottage Garden), fashioned an Oriental water garden lined with weeping willows, and had gardeners rake the water lilies into patterns on his pond. He thereby fashioned an ambience in which the Japanese aesthetic and a profound love of nature were interwoven. Drawn from these sources, Monet’s later work at Giverny is now seen as a forerunner of twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism.

Sharing the French painter’s predilection for the Asian sensibility and his passion for the natural world, American ceramist Peter Callas offers an intriguing analogue to Monet. Callas has lived for the past twenty years on three acres in New Jersey in an 1812 German Moravian farmhouse on the Pequest River. His home is in the midst of a radiant, blossom-filled garden bathed with a dappled light. Wildflowers line the river running through his property, inviting the occasional visit of a blue heron. A botanical arboretum with an Asian flair boasts rare species, chosen for their varied hues. Nearby, a 50-acre orchard supplies peaches and apples. These Edenesque surroundings, together with extensive travel and study both at home and abroad—Europe, Australia, South America, Asia and particularly Japan—have informed Callas’ work for the past thirty years. Combining these influences with a very American dynamism, he is now making large-scale sculptures that reflect the past at the same time that they plunge ahead into an energetic expressionism. “Where there is no passion,” he asserts, “there is no backbone.”

For Callas, life in his own exquisite setting is exhilarating. A self-proclaimed “horticulture bug,” he tends flower beds boasting over 200 varieties, spies on root systems, and notes colors and textures, the strengths of tree trunks, and the marvelous vitality of swelling buds. Callas’ empathy with nature parallels that of the Japanese, whose animistic Shinto traditions hold that spirits inhabit the natural world—mountains, trees, rocks—lending these a numinous quality. This reverence for natural phenomena fosters in turn a heightened awareness of and respect for color, texture, design and material. Nature for the Asian is less a juxtaposition of objects than a hallowed field of energies.

Callas’ impassioned identification with nature, which simultaneously destroys and regenerates, leads him, like his Japanese counterparts, to eschew Western “perfection” in favor of surfaces that are deliberately coarsened and shapes that deny the symmetrical and the concentric. He prefers, instead, forms that are gnarled, wrenched and warped, evoking nature’s raw, transformative powers and breathtaking splendor.

Also allying Callas to both Japanese traditions and to natural processes is his commitment to wood firing, almost universally recognized as aleatory and edgy. But, according to Callas, the rewards are at the edge. Admittedly anachronistic and downright inefficient, wood firing nonetheless produces a timeless beauty, and seemingly “accidental” glazes resulting from the interaction of clay, ash and atmosphere. Difficult to control and apparently fortuitous, these glazes effect a wide range of textures and colors. In a wood-fired kiln, the artist can harness and reproduce, as it were, the earth’s fiery diurnal processes, those millennial metamorphoses that erupt as volcanoes. Just as clay undergoes a physical transformation in the kiln, so do the earth’s tectonic plates change chemically as they cast against each other and are subjected to intense, prolonged heat cycles. “Wood firing,” he says, “is high drama, a powerful metaphor of nature.”

After having earned international recognition for vases, double-necked vessels, flasks, platters and ceremonial tea wares, Callas has, during the past decade, focused on nonfigurative sculpture. Bringing to this medium his characteristic gestural energy, he fashions plurifacial, tuberous configurations rising out of stable, yet fluid bases that harmonize the rough, smooth and sharp. Swirling masses of molten material are solidified, gouged and scored, calling attention to the malleable quality of the clay itself. Concavities often jagged, sometimes more regular, intimate the sombrous mystery of caves. Holes, reminiscent of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, reveal a concern for the void, connecting, in Moore’s words, “one side with the other,” resulting in greater three-dimensionality. Slabs branch out from the core, extending into space, as though denying restrictive contours, underscoring the subtle tension between mass and border. Other passages, like double images, hint at the animate, perhaps the features of a human visage or the outline of an animal face. In a deep, resonant palette due to the elevated temperatures of the firing, the pieces range from grayed blues to more roseate colorations.

The parallels to Callas’ “wrenched” and “eroded” aesthetic are provocative: Monet’s late dreamlike, almost calligraphic natural forms; and the nonfigurative, gestural paintings of the Abstract Expressionists during the ’50s. These painters believed that art’s ability to embody human experience is independent of representation. Art divorced from description could, they declared, convey universal, very human themes. Committed to vestigial shapes, abstract arabesques and cascading lines, they saw the canvas, in the words of Harold Rosenberg, as “an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined.” They maintained, furthermore, that the very intensity of their “action” touched and, in a way, harnessed those dynamic, and largely unconscious, archetypal forces controlling the outside world as well as the human psyche. Their skills finely honed with years of practice, the “action” painters were thus able to temper freedom with control, inspiration with discipline. Translating a similar vitality into clay, Callas makes sculptures that intersect nature’s accidental, divergent side—those characteristics favored by the Asian mind.

Photos:
top, “Zao,” 36 in. (91 cm) in height, slab-built stoneware, once-fired in an anagama, with natural glaze, 1994.

bottom, “Exodus,” 36 in. (91 cm) in height, slab-built stoneware, once-fi red in an anagama, with natural glaze, 1999, by Peter Callas, Belvidere, New Jersey.

Photo credits: Craig Phillips, Brett Szemple