Skip to main content

Andersen Design Vintage In Wiscasset Community Center Show

Prototype design- Carved Vase by Weston Neil Andersen
This weekend, on Saturday , April 7th, Andersen Design will be featured in the First Vintage Show at the Wiscasset Community Center
Phone(207) 882-8230Websitehttp://www.wiscassetrec.com/
A sampling of cobbles- small inexpensive but individualistic ceramic art

The entry road to the Center runs next to the sports field to the Wiscasset High School. Traveling on the road headed to Augusta from Wiscasset, the entry road is before on epasses the sports field. There is a red & white sign announcing the show.

The show includes work made by local artisans . We fit into both the vintage and local artisans category and will be displaying both.

An early 1950's Andersen Chowder Bowl, signed in the hand written Andersen signature

For the last several months, I have been photographing our vintage work and publishing it in an Air Table data base. The data base is not yet ready for prime time and so is not yet publicly accessible but we will grant access by special request.

We have 467 pieces documented to date and a lot more to add. This includes everything from mint pieces to broken pieces. During the 65 years in which Andersen Design has been producing ceramic art and design, many one of a kind decorated pieces were created using our slip cast designs as a canvas. Back in the day, when there was no instant documentation technology. the best pieces were quickly sold without a record being made. We got to keep the broken or chipped works. 

Recently I found a box of broken rectangular trays completely blacked with soot, because they had been in a house fire. I washed off the soot and found underneath a jig saw puzzle of decorative ceramic drawings by my mother. They look like an artists sketch pad but they are not as easy to do in ceramics as they look. Ceramics is not a what-you-see-is-what-you-get technology. Colors after being fired look nothing like the un-fired colors. Ceramic colors are also very sensitive to teh weight of application. My mother ( Brenda Andersen)'s drawings looked so spontaneous that one can only presume that she had a very intuitive relationship to the ceramic decorating process. This kind of work is rarely done, especially not in production ceramics, which is why I often say that Andersen Design was doing production as an art form long before it was invented by Andy Warhol.
A drawing of the author of this blog as a young girl by Brenda Andersen


Although many of our retained works are broken, they represent a larger body of work that is out there across the American landscape, individualistic - one- of- a - kind artists work which has never been recorded for prosperity. This is one task we hope to accomplish through the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen.

So come to the show at WiscassetCommunity Center on Saturday and see what a historical perspective of one of America's most unusual and classic ceramic design companies looks like. See you there!
Three of Brenda's Studio work done on the large Egg Form Vase by Weston


Mackenzie
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Difference Between Writing for Substack and Writing For Medium

Substack is evolving as the medium where the writer has the freedom to evolve new forms as Medium shows indications of becoming more regulated. Shubham Dhage Unsplash I published a story on  Substack  less than 24 hours since I began composing this post. It had already exceeded by more than double my average number of reads two posts ago. The previous post exceeded the same average by 50% and that was over a few days and so I must be doing something right, which is just granting myself permission to be me. There are no editors on Substack. There   are no rules- You are in charge of instructing yourself on how to be you. Films that I find engaging, do not necessarily have storylines that follow a straight line. Sometimes it’s a mystery of complexities that draws one in — or not. Shubham Dhage Unsplash I have always been the kind of person who thinks in circles or better-said spirals. When I was in high school I dreamed I was walking across the footbridge in the s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Yes We Can! The SBIR and STTR Grants for American Small Business

  Does economic development rule the people, or serve the people? Let Freedom Ring! photo by Yves Monrique-unsplash In the 1980’s when Burton A Weisbrod first published  The NonProfit Economy , he wrote that the US economy was composed of three sectors, public, private, and nonprofit, intended to operate independently, each filling a unique function, which the others did not, but in the 1980’s, they were already merging and adapting in ways not ethically clean. In 1997 Weisbrod published a paper titled  The future of the nonprofit sector: Its entwining with private enterprise and government . Today In Maine the entwining is wide, deep and complete, concentrating power in the interests of a small circle of associates wielding wealth redistribution as it’s instrument, branding itself as networking and celebratory public private relationships. The conflation of the public, private, and non-profit sectors is a top down system. over riding local power where in public and priva...
2 comments
Read more

Decentralized Opportunity Zones is the Future of Work-Life Balance

In the Portland, Maine industrial opportunity zone, a homeless shelter is planned as a residence in a business but businesses in residence are not permitted. Stephanie Klepacki Unsplash Homelessness is not an isolated social status. It is the extremity of continuous social-economic fabric, with each thread interwoven to create the whole. The Homeless Tax Shelter The homeless shelter proposed by the Portland, Maine city council is advanced by  developers taking advantage of 2017 opportunity zone tax advantages . There are multiple social issues entangled in the political web of the proposed homeless shelter, starting with why is a homeless shelter being proposed in an industrial zone? To all appearances, the Portland, Maine homeless shelter will be financed using opportunity zone tax advantages for investors. an assumption based on the location of the planned homeless shelter in an  opportunity zone  and that the developers charged with the financing are intimately connec...
Post a Comment
Read more