Jeff Oestreich   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

Published in Keramik Magazin

Jeff Oestreich's work has undergone a number of transformations since he returned from his apprenticeship in 1971 at the Leach Pottery in St. Ives. Through all of these changes, though, his work has retained one constant and that is his unabashed joy and enthusiasm for pottery making. He began studying pottery in 1965 and like many young potters at that time, read Bernard Leach's A Potters Book. Leach's portrayal of a potter's life had immense appeal to Oestreich's romantic nature. So when he graduated in 1969 he decided against graduate school and instead applied to the Leach pottery for a two-year apprenticeship. He admits to being disappointed early in his apprenticeship, he was unprepared for how rigorous and disciplined the work was. It was completely antithetical to the way he had been taught pottery in the United States. Eventually, however, he came to love the rhythm of making and firing and found himself completely absorbed in this "organism", as he called it, where everyone had a task and was skilled at it. He struggled, while he was there, to find his own voice, making his own work in the evenings and on weekends and even rebuilding a small salt kiln for that work. It was, nevertheless, a trying time and he left exactly two years to the day that he arrived.

When he returned to the United States in June of 1969 he tried to model his work on the Leach model by spending part of his time making standard ware and the rest making one of a kind work. He developed 12 prototypes and had a brochure printed offering those pieces. It was an utter failure, only one store asked for things for which they never paid. He again turned to the Leach model and decided to make tiles. After finishing his first batch he received a reprieve in the form of an unexpected check and dropped the project, realizing that his heart just was not in it. He wanted to make what he wanted, but he still didn't know exactly what that was. One thing he did know was that he wanted to shed the Leach look. When he reflects on those days now, he realizes that all the pitfalls he experienced then were blessings in disguise because they made question himself and search for answers about the direction he should be pursuing with his work.

He built his first wood fired kiln in 1980 and it proved to be a turning point for him. He was still making some repetitive standard ware, but the wood fired kiln was so labor intensive that he began to feel the need to spend more time on each piece. He began reduce the amount of standard ware he made and started to spend more time on altering the other thrown work. He describes this period as restless; he wanted to combine in his work both the lusciousness of glazes and the surface quality of wood firing, yet didn't quite know how to achieve it. In the mid 1980s he had his first exhibition at Garth Clark Gallery in New York. It was the boom period in American ceramics; new galleries and publications were springing up and with them new collectors. Oestreich embarked on yet another course, the gallery vessel. He focused his energy on a teapot form and a vase form. It seemed a natural direction at first, because he was becoming more interested in color and oxidation (something that had always been heretical to potters from the Leach school) and was focusing even more on altering pieces after he took them off the wheel. It was an exciting time for him; he gained recognition and for the first time some financial success. After ten years of making these pieces, though, he began to lose interest. The preplanning was enormous and the construction was time consuming. It was a totally different standard of
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