Skip to main content
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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How The MPERS Contract Came To Be Embedded in the Maine Constitution

Is The Maine Public Retirement System Unconstitutional? According to the Maine Public Employees ComprehensiveFinancial Report of 2010 , the Maine Public Employees Retirement System was established in 1942 to provide services for retiring public employees. No information is given about how the Public Employees Retirement System was legally structured in 1942. In the report MPERS is described as “an independent public agency of the State of Maine that traces its history to 1942”. Wikipedia  uses the same term but when the link is clicked it reveals that Wikipedia has no idea what " independent public agency " means.  An online search for history of MPERS between 1942 and 1985 comes up empty.  In 1985 during the administration of Governor Joseph E Brennan, the Maine Legislature passed a statute announcing its intentions of using general taxpayer monies to provide for retirement funds and death benefits for public employees, a faction which, incidentally, includes th...

High Brow Art VS the Marketplace and the Maine Juice Conference

TWEET THIS http://goo.gl/xdwZDk Continuing with my story from HERE ...(and incorporating a few paragraphs from this earlier but incomplete telling ) Finally, after a year of receiving stimulus fund notices for non-profits only, in the fall of 2009, I received an email from the Maine Arts Commission about a competition for small businesses for what I took to be, a modest grant for the sum of 30000.00 from an "anonymous source". In a moment of hopeful delusions, I imagined that the Maine Arts Commission had come to its senses and realized that they needed to support the private sector. The competition was called an "elevator pitch competition" which means a pitch delivered in five minutes. Even the written answers to questions on the application were required to be answered in a minimal number of words, brevity being stressed as being so important that if your couldn't explain a business idea in five minutes, then one's business idea is simply not ...

Statutory Bond Question Requirements Amplify -NOT Negate Maine Constituion

TWEET THIS http://goo.gl/VcBj8O UPDATE NOV 11 2014:  Since I wrote This post- I cam across the statute governing Bond Ratification- as amended by the 2013 legislature It looks to be that the sentence "To meet the requirement that the signed statement of the Treasurer of State accompany any ballot question for ratification of a bond issue, the statement may be printed on the ballot" was amended by adding this "or it may be printed as a separate document that is made available to voters as provided in Title 21-A, sections 605-A and 651" Section 605-A no longer exists and I am tracking it down. Section 651 says it can be posted outside the guardrail which separates voters from the rest of the world. I am writing a new post to cover this new information Update Nov 12, 2014!   The link I originally referenced is here ,  THIS IS HOW THE LAW WAS WRITTEN IN  2011 - showing the process of incrementalism at play In this link  part of the sentence below is s...