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SPOTLIGHT
ON THE ARTS - November 2000 by Deanna Mascle Making His Mark When you are commissioned to create the Kentucky Governor’s Award for the Arts then your art becomes the very symbol of artistic excellence for your state. Studio potter Wayne Bates saw this dream become a reality and yet does not think of himself as an artist. In his mind, he is a craftsman. While he created objects of beauty, he also insists they be useful. “I like to shape things and carve, I like to make things happen,” he says. “Anyone who has ever worked with their hands knows the feeling.” While an undergraduate at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., Bates majored in painting. It was at Union that he began working with clay and taught himself how to use the potter’s wheel and fired the kilns for his instructor. That interest sparked into a lifelong passion for pottery. So he went on to earn a graduate degree in ceramics at the University of Georgia.
During this time he continued his study of Indian pottery. By 1978, Bates was tired of academia and urban living and his wife was able to find a teaching position at Murray State University, so he became a studio potter. “I knew that to have a chance to make anything worthwhile would mean going out on my own,” he says. The move couldn’t have been timed better. “In the 1980s the demand for craft was huge and there were relatively few makers,” he says. In recent years, supply has caught up with demand. Fortunately, Bates has created a following for his work which is exhibited in galleries and shops throughout the U.S. He spends his days in the studio and gallery he designed and built himself working with Grolleg porcelain to create a variety of bowls, platters and bases embellished by the sgraffito process. He shapes the porcelain by throwing it on a potter’s wheel and uses his hands to form each piece. He then applies color in the form of a colored clay coating. Bates then begins a process he calls “finding the light” which involves cutting away the color in a variety of lines and shapes. While it is a very intellectual process, Bates says the attraction is simple. “It’s a very primal process.” You can visit Wayne Bates web gallery at http://www.waynebates.com or you can arrange a private showing at Gallery 121 in Murray by calling (270) 436-5610. Gallery 121 will hold its annual open house from noon to 6 p.m. Dec. 15-17.
Deanna Mascle is a
staff writer for The Lane Report. Back to Spotlight on the Arts Index
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Bates served as kiln
supervisor at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in
Maine in the summer of 1969. Through contacts made there
he was hired to teach at the Philadelphia College of Art.
From 1970 to 1978 he lived and worked in Philadelphia,
teaching in and co-chairing the crafts department. While
there, he also served as a ceramics consultant to the
historic Moravian Tile Works in Doylestown, Pa., where he
supervised the reactivation of tile production.