Essex Tyler : Pottery

“Raku pots, veined with cobalt, want to burst open like ripe fruit. The textures are smooth and burnished, with intricate cracks appearing by chance, a metaphor for life.” (Sam Bleakley, Riding the Wave, 2016). 

Before painting, Essex first established himself as a potter, discovering raku by chance as he took a course at the Tate in St Ives in 1995. A type of Japanese pottery, raku is considered the traditional style for the ceramics used in Japanese tea ceremonies. The raku technique itself is essentially when glazed ceramics are extracted from the kiln while still glowing red hot and are then plunged in a material that can catch fire, such as sawdust. This method starves the piece of any oxygen, which creates a myriad of colours within the glaze. It is this rapid heating and cooling of raku pottery that results in the clay and glaze becoming distressed and causes the characteristic cracks to appear. 

“The techniques of Raku pottery are not dissimilar to those of Zen Buddhism – intense heat firing and then cooling outside the kiln. Zen takes you straight to the red-hot heart of an object or a perception, an idea or a feeling, and then reduces it through a swift switch to intense contemplation. This is caught in Zen koans – parables that burn with penetrating description and finish on a cool note of contemplation. Soyen Shaku, the Zen teacher who first brought Zen Buddhism to America, where Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder eagerly adopted the teachings and practices, said : ‘My heart burns like fire but my eyes are as cold as dead ashes’. In other words, an experience ignites, but a subsequent contemplation creates reflective distance. Essex knows this intuitively from raku techniques but has successfully translated this across to his paintings. It is as if he has caught the world on fire with its toes dipped into a cold sea producing instant contemplation, so that impulse and reflection are caught at one and the same moment on the canvas.” (Sam Bleakley, Riding the Wave, 2016)

Essex’s raku pieces fill the Tyler Gallery with their subtly smokey smell that hints at their creation: forged in the fire. His undeniable expertise and experience is reflected in the beauty of his pottery, with its vibrant flashes of colour and intricate lines and patterns.  

View Essex Tyler’s Paintings