Jeff Oestreich   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> making from what he was accustomed and he was uncomfortable with it. All the things like warping, glaze skips and variations in surface that he delighted in were unacceptable in the genre of the gallery vessel. They had to be flawless. Oestreich had no doubt heard Leach echo John Ruskin's admonition in his famous chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" from his book Stones of Venice in which Ruskin argued that,

"Nothing that lives is or can be rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.
In all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty.
...to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality."

When he eventually quit making those pieces in the mid '90s, he returned to a new version of domestic work. He had discovered soda firing and felt like he was finally "home". He was able to combine his love for the exposed clay surface that wood firing provided with his love for glaze and bright colors. This new uncovered freedom to like color made him feel he said, "like a kid in a candy store." While this work appears strikingly different from his wood fired work of the early '80s, it is filled with the same kind of intensity and made in the same spirit as that earlier period. It is, for example, domestic in both size and nature, and made for the home as opposed to the gallery. Yet they still retain some of that architectural quality of the gallery vessels. He no longer, however, makes "purely functional" work for the public the way he did in the '80s. He hasn't made a casserole, for example, in fifteen years, partly he says, because he doesnžt use them but mostly because he no longer feels the kind of moral obligation that came from his St. Ives training, to make functional pottery merely for its own sake. He simply makes things that he is passionate about and hopes that others will find them compelling.

Art Deco has become a source of inspiration for his newest work and you can see the influence not only in the way he applies glazes to create specific Art Deco patterns but also in the angular quality of the forms. His attraction to Art Deco is not only its symmetry and order, but also its sense of playfulness and its expressive quality. And that, it seems, is what Oestreich appears most interested—exploring how he can make his work more expressive. In his newest work, for example, Oestreich works at creating tension by employing different types of formal and mannered feet that appear at odds with the rather sturdy nature of the rest of the pot. Oestreich is after what he describes as "elegant sturdiness".

Oestreich has always worked intuitively, sensing the direction he should take his work rather than intellectually calculating the next move. Often it is not until much later that he realizes why he chose a particular path. A few years ago Oestreich, for instance, decided to rent some of his property out to a local farmer to grow organic crops. One of the first things the farmer planted was rye. That fall the rye ripened to a deep golden color the intensity of which amazed him. He returned the next day to photograph it and was suddenly struck with not only the color of the rye but the deep blue of the sky and the brilliant green of the fields, he realized for the first time that all the colors that he had been working to achieve in soda firing had been around him all these years. Nature had been the source of his palette without his realizing it. Because he does not offer intellectual rationale for these new directions, it is difficult sometimes for viewers of his work to understand these seemingly incongruous departures. I am
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