Byron Temple, Romantic Pragmatist   1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> Temple's work. It is probably seen at its best in the "tie boxes" that Temple started making in the late 1970s. The clay is unadorned, often a dark saggar fired body, but sometimes a very lightly salt fired porcelain. The line of the jar's silhouette is straight, and clean, but taut, the lid is often just a cap that conforms to the jar's contour and has no handle. The whole shape is austere and minimalist except for the small lugs through which Temple has run a string that ties over the lid and secures it. The other point of interest that Temple provided was his stamp, which is almost always centered on the body of the piece. A variation on the tie box is a porcelain tea jar, again straight sided with a dark blue/black band on the shoulder and a lid that is recessed into the jar. The handle on the lid is a silver ring and the small delicate lugs on the shoulder of the jar hold a braided silver cord. There is a contained energy in these pieces and a sophistication in conception and execution that holds our interest and continues to satisfy us long after our initial confrontation.

Essentially I have no competition in this country from hand potters, because most American potters are uninterested in making fifty pots alike...especially if a machine can do it.
   —Byron Temple

Temple returned to the United States in 1962 and applied, with letters of recommendation from Leach, to graduate school at Alfred and Cranbrook but was rejected. Something he later viewed as a blessing in disguise. He heard about a situation in Galena, Illinois and with a loan from an old friend who had come into some money, set up his first pottery there. He only stayed for 10 months when he heard of a craft "village" that was being put together in New Hope, Pennsylvania and made the move east to be part of that. He was there only about a year when the venture folded and he crossed the Delaware River to Lambertville where he found an old brick carriage house without electricity or running water, it was perfect. He bought it and set up the pottery of which he had always dreamed. He was to stay in Lambertville for almost thirty years. He had always been fascinated with Scandinavian design and now he used some aspects of that influence as a point of departure for his new work. He kept from his Leach training the idea that his designs had to be produced in volume and simple enough for apprentices to reproduce. In those early years he produced anywhere from five to ten thousand pieces a year. He would decide on a line of tableware that met both his design standards—that were satisfying aesthetically—and that could be reproduced quickly without compromising any of the character of the pots. He often left large sections of bare clay showing and always tried to leave traces of the process of making exposed. Nothing had a turned foot and the only decoration was overlapping glazes. He was indifferent to brush decoration, saying that the raw clay was its own decoration. He also felt that there was a tendency among potters to become to involved in the search for breathtaking glazes that distracted the viewer from what Temple saw as basically weak forms. Once he decided on a line of work, he would produce a catalog, sometimes it would take the form of a large poster, other times an accordion folded brochure. He put as much thought into the design of the catalog as he did the pots. One of the other subjects besides pottery that had interested him in high school was lettering and for a period in the early '50s, while he was living in New York, he painted signs to make a living. It was in his catalogs that Temple's graphic sense came to the forefront. He used the catalogs not only to focus attention on his work, but also to create a milieu for it. Every postcard, brochure and catalog, from Temple spoke to his
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