The Mystery of the great fire These few lines cannot hope to relate the industries and patient efforts of the potters and ceramists. They mean to be only an initiation to the mystery of the great fire. Though improved as it is nowadays, by the recent discoveries made by chemical and physics, the art of ceramics is always closely attached to the earth from where it comes. The first necessary element for the potter, is the millenary clay; crushed and purified, it lets itself be modeled by the fingers of the turner. The loaf of earth becomes round, then the shape begins to arise, it springs, it sinks, the molecules tighten; on the wheel tray the frail vessel to which the potter's fingers give a last stoke, seems to quiver before it immobilises itself, and leaves the wheel where it was given birth. Or, obliged to go through the finest sieve, the argillous mud, of which clever mixing composed the texture, is put in a plaster mould which gives in the most variegated shapes, from the ordenary rustic pot, on which wonderfully colored flowers will be painted, to the lovely slim vase of which the enamels will be the sole ornament.
On the drying boards the ceramist chooses a form, a frail and thin crust of earth. Then among the oxyds, he takes the powders which he mixes in order to obtain a liquid paste which his brushes leave, touch by touch, on the vase. With his imaginative mind, he paints arabesques, or flowers, or inlays chimeras on the cups, the amphoras or the dishes. From the ordinary glazed earth bathed in enamel to the decorated vase, his technic makes of him an ordinary potter or a great ceramist. Day after day, for weeks of hard work, he tries never to make the same pattern. Before he puts the result of his work in the oven, he makes other tests, a new oxyd, an enamel never used before, trying to make a new sucess of a more delicate colour. To intrust the minute work of several months, the hopes which represent new enamels, to this unconquered element which is the fire at a high temperature. Same as a medieval dingeon, the oven deeply set in the ground shall then receive in it’s caskets, of refractory earth, the vases of different shapes, the frail statuettes. One after the other the caskets are piled up to the vault. Then there ist only to wall up the door and to screw the steeled keys which will hold the oven shut during the baking. For several days the oven ist cooling down. Hours of feverish expectation, hours of hope and of anguish. At last the door is opened. With his hands gloved with muffles, the ceramist takes away the burning caskets, and then the unique pieces come to the light: Copper red with warm tons, celadon-green, reddish-brown, black or simple statuettes of which the fire has respected the rustic or delicate shapes; unchangeable and majestic witnesses even in their modesty. They are the reward of long months of arduous labor during which they unite the work of the hands with the efforts of the intelligence. From the humble potter to the genial ceramist, handicraftsmen and artists of today are united to the old eastern masters and the great medieval painters by a common love: that of the fire. Jean Mougin
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