Pottery might be considered a craft, but in the hands of John Ffrench it is undoubtedly an art.He talks to Deirdre McQuillan about his enduring love of colour, clay and his native Ireland
Herbert Read once said that the art of a country, the fineness of its sensibility, could be judged by its pottery. John Ffrench knew Read and the notion of pottery as "a dreamer's art" is one that makes him smile. The celebrated American-based Irish potter is the subject of a forthcoming documentary by David Shaw Smith on RTÉ filmed both in Ireland and the US. His work is now on display in a major exhibition in Kennys, Galway.
We meet in his studio by his house in Kinvara, Co Galway, where he and his wife Primm spend every summer before returning to Stockbridge in Massachusetts where they have lived and worked for nearly 40 years. The studio, a converted turf shed beside the house, is stacked with pots and glazes and a dresser filled with vibrant objets d'art he has made.
The exuberant, colourful work of this Irish-born ceramicist is a clue to his mixed Irish-Italian heritage. His father, a captain in the British army, was an engineer who worked in China on the Trans-Siberian Railway. A friend of the Italian ambassador to China, he stopped off in London on his journey home and met the ambassador's niece, a beautiful 20-year-old girl from a wealthy Milanese family.
Sophia Brambilla became his wife and he took her home to Castle Ffrench in Galway, to begin a new life in Ireland. "Fifi" brought not only her wealth and culture to the family, but optimism and a sunny nature inherited from her Italian, German and Russian blood.
Ffrench remembers a happy childhood in the castle. The cut-stone mansion built in 1779 near Ballinasloe is set in a landscape of farmland, woodland, bog and river. It had 18th-century Italian paintings and inlaid 19th-century furniture made for Napoleon by Giuseppe Maggiolini, all brought there by Ffrench's mother.
It is no longer in the Ffrench family, but John remains deeply attached to the place and is a friend of the current owners. "I love the building. It is a most gracious house. Daniel O'Connell used to stay at Castle Ffrench when he was campaigning in Caltra and I remember there was a window signed with his name, Daniel O'Connell MP, made with a diamond, I presume."
Interested in pottery even as a child, he studied art in at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin after Blackrock College, but there were no opportunities to study the craft in Dublin at the time. "Lucy Charles was a very great influence, she taught me about design, pattern and balance, and Maurice MacGonigal was a wonderful teacher too," he recalls.
Brought up speaking English and Italian, he furthered his studies in Florence at the Insituto Statale, discovered his Italian relatives, made many friends, worked in a small ceramics studio and sold his work through Victor Waddington's gallery in Dublin. "He took everything I made and was a great sponsor of my work," he says.
His work from this period shows the same exuberance that still characterises his work. There were hand-built ceramic vessels with painted decoration as well as jewellery and collages.
"I just love to use colour. I like very bright things - people tell me it is the Mediterranean in me, but in the various places I have studied there has always been colour." Through an Indian friend in Florence who loved his ceramics, he was invited to India to introduce glazes to native potters. "I had a delightful time there for three years and met wonderful people."
Back in Ireland, he brought his Italian modernist style to a mostly Leach-dominated pottery scene. "Leach is lovely, controlled and austere, but it is not me," he asserts, admitting that he is far more interested in and influenced by Picasso, Gaudi and Hunterwasser in Vienna. He remembers Hunterwasser arriving at the Venice Biennale. "His car was painted just like his paintings."
Despite working in a beautiful 18th-century building in Kilkenny, he found his time there uninspiring. Later he spent three months in Iceland sharing a studio with an Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson.
"It never got dark at all when I was there, I found broad daylight all the time very confusing." In the meantime, he kept returning home to Castle Ffrench at Christmas and following the Scandinavian Design Report of 1962, a government report highlighting the need for good design in Irish industry, was persuaded by Bill Walsh to set up a pottery studio in Arklow. By now married to Primm Turner, an American artist and teacher whom he had met in Florence, he settled down in Avoca, Co Wicklow, where their three daughters, Sofia, Felicitas and Crispina, grew up.
At the pottery he introduced new shapes and new methods of decoration such as stamping and sprigging as well as innovative methods of hand painting, modelling and tile making. After seven years, "we were offered wonderful jobs at a school in Stockbridge", a tiny village where the Boston Symphony Orchestra spends the summer, and left to work together there as teachers in 1969.
Sitting in his Kinvara cottage, he confides that he remains deeply attached to his native country. "My links with Ireland remain strong. I have very deep roots in Galway. Two of my children were born in Galway and the other in Dublin." Their house was bought 20 years ago years ago when he retired from teaching.
Painted in bright blue and yellow (yellow is a favourite colour of his), the house is surrounded by a small garden filled with flowers. "I don't throw on the wheel," he explains, "but I make by coil, rolling it out and flattening it into ribbons and building up that way. A lot develops as I build. I have an idea of what the shape is going to be and then it takes on a life of its own as it goes along. Generally I work on two or three pieces at a time. When I am not making pottery, I like to potter in the garden."
A modest man, generous in his praise of others and an admirer of Italian ceramicists such as Salvatore Meli and Marcello Fantoni, he believes that pottery breaks down definitions of art and craft. His works have become collector's items, as is the wonderful, award-winning calendar produced by the Ffrenches every year.
What began as a gift for a dozen friends 35 years ago is now a major family endeavour in which each contributes their own designs for the series. Last year 900 copies were printed. As a child, he loved to paint furniture in Castle Ffrench and he continues to do so for his granddaughter.
The exhibition in Kennys contains wall pieces based on images of buildings, ships and abstract designs, large vases, collages and bowls.
"I was thinking about marine life in the pools of the Burren and the strange things you see in the waves in Co Clare," he says as he shows me a series of bowls with finger-like extensions.
According to Peter Lamb, his most enthusiastic Irish patron, who has been collecting his work for years, Ffrench was the first to make sculptural ceramics using colour and painting. "His pieces are almost pieces of sculpture rather than utilitarian domestic items and get more beautiful as he goes along. They are fantastic objects that make you feel happy. They are works of art."
•John Ffrench's exhibition runs in Kennys, Galway until July 27