I’m still, today, very interested in function—in not necessarily the actual function but in the idea of function . . . there’s an implied function. And one interacts with the piece with that knowledge.
Betty Woodman, in Charles Woodman, Betty Woodman: Thinking Out Loud, filmed in New York, April 1990, video, 19:31 minutes, available at vimeo.com/209317503.
Though she practiced ceramics throughout her artistic career, Betty Woodman might likewise be characterized as a painter. Vivid splashes of color decorate her clay vessels, known for their large scale and winged appendages. But as the artist explained, “what I’m dealing with is as much painting as it is sculpture.”1 Her works are a marriage of surface and form, wherein paint moves to respond to the geometries of the ceramic vessel and its shape extends the painted picture. Expanding on notions of the still life and her woodblock collages, Woodman pulls the vase from the painting’s surface. As art critic Arthur Danto described, “as if the pitcher was not transcribed but transformed, as if expressive drawing of the Cubist still life and the splashy color of the Fauve still life were transferred back to reality, so that the new still life obviates the need to paint it.”2
Betty Woodman, in Charles Woodman, Betty Woodman: Thinking Out Loud, filmed in New York, April 1990, video, 19:31 minutes, available at vimeo.com/209317503. ↩︎
Arthur C. Danto, “The Vase as Form and Subject: Craft and Meaning in the Work of Betty Woodman,” in Betty Woodman(Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1996), 16. ↩︎
When Betty Woodman graduated from the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University, New York, in 1950, she taught pottery classes and made production pottery—plates, bowls, cups, and saucers for domestic use. Her love for clay arrived early. In high school, she was drawn to the “magic of making something out of nothing”1 and the usefulness of the ceramic object. She saw making pottery as a mode of serving society—putting something useful into the world. Woodman worked out of a studio behind her house in Boulder, developing a strong technical sense and a relationship with form through repetition. As she began experimenting with more extravagant forms, the image of the container remained an anchoring concept. And when she expanded the pot’s form to painting and sculptural installation, she returned to ideas about the domestic—the ceramic object’s familiar place in the home. For her 2016 exhibition Theatre of the Domestic at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Woodman created the illusion of interior spaces. Paintings were laid on the floor like rugs with vases placed on top, and a composition of clay slab cutouts—leftover pieces from her studio practice—looked like decorative wallpaper.
Betty Woodman, artist talk with curator Vincenzo de Bellis, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, February 3, 2016 (posted February 18, 2016), video, 1:10:30 hours, available at youtube.com/watch?v=3teQtMPyajg. ↩︎
Betty Woodman has an eye for architecture; she is often drawn to ornate but functional characteristics of the built environment, like the handles on a door or latches on a window. She and her husband, the painter and photographer George Woodman, spent much of their time abroad, traveling internationally and living in Italy for six months out of the year. She encountered vases everywhere, across place and history, as ceremonial objects and utilitarian forms. With a history going back millennia, ceramic vases pour water into fountains, flank doorways, and line the tops of Roman frescoes. The vase, in Woodman’s view, was the archetypal ceramic: “having fallen in love with clay . . . if I make something that’s a vase, everybody knows it’s made of clay. So, it’s about this material and the universality of it.”1 In flattening, enlarging, and fragmenting the vase, she explored the boundaries of its recognizable form—how far could she abstract it from the functional container without compromising its origin.
Betty Woodman, talk with curator Vincenzo de Bellis, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, February 3, 2016 (posted February 18, 2016), video, 1:10:30 hours, available at youtube.com/watch?v=3teQtMPyajg. ↩︎
Betty Woodman alternated between functional and expressive work, allowing ideas from one practice to flow into the other. For example, looking at a shelf lined with a series of identical clay pitchers in her studio led her to produce an imaginative series of pitchers melded together as if one continuous gestural form. Serial production also compelled Woodman to think about the relationship between objects, as in triptych and diptych works like the “Kimono Vases,” in which the vases give sharply outlined form to the negative space between the objects.
Betty Woodman always enjoyed painting, but in her high-school art classes in Boston, where the artist grew up, she was drawn to clay: “It seemed real. . . . It seemed much less abstract than painting. . . . You put something in it and you used it and that was very important,” she once explained.1 Though her ceramics increasingly embraced abstraction and eventually incorporated her own painterly finishes, early in her career her husband—the painter and photographer George Woodman—painted her ceramics. They had met in Boston, where she was living after returning home from college and teaching a pottery class at the YMCA. George Woodman, then a freshman at Harvard, took one of Betty’s classes. Their artistic careers developed independently, but art and teaching—both would hold fine-art faculty positions at the University of Colorado at Boulder—were foundational in their lives together.
Betty Woodman, in Charles Woodman, Betty Woodman: Thinking Out Loud, filmed in New York, April 1990, video, 19:31 minutes, available at vimeo.com/209317503. ↩︎
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