Sgraffito pottery

Sgraffito artists
Famous sgraffito artists
Sgraffito art examples

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Most Lustrous: the ceramics of Julia Carter Preston

Posted on: 13 January 2023 by Amanda Draper, Curator of Art and Exhibitions in 2023

At the VG&M we have two objects on display that everybody admires. One is a large bowl and the other a jar topped with a golden fish. They are by the acclaimed Liverpool ceramics artist, Julia Carter Preston, and are gleaming and gorgeous. Let’s find out more about the artist and the historic background to her style and technique.

Julia Carter Preston at work in her Bluecoat studio c.1985. © The Bluecoat

Julia Carter Preston

Julia was born in Liverpool in 1926 and studied at Liverpool School of Art during the 1940s, specialising in ceramics. After gaining her National Diploma in art in 1951, she taught ceramics in various colleges in the region, including Liverpool School of Art, where she became Head of Ceramics. John Lennon was among her many students. Julia also developed her career as a practising artist, working from a studio in the Bluecoat Chambers. By the mid-1970s she had largely left teaching to flourish

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The Art of Scratching - Tracing the Rich History and Legacy of Sgraffito

Throughout history, artists and other creatives used different techniques to bring their visions to life. Artistic techniques developed and improved over time, with some techniques spreading from one medium to others. The domain of pottery is one such example. Ceramics and clay pottery were often decorated with ornaments before they were glazed, making their surface hard. Scratching and carving, deriving from ceramics, soon became a popular way to decorate not just pottery but also other hard surfaces.

The name of the technique is sgraffito (pl. sgraffiti), an Italian term meaning 'to scratch,' which in its nominative case stands for a drawing or inscription made on a wall or other surface through scratching. Mainly a technique of ornamentation, sgraffito has a long history stretching many centuries in the past.

The History of Sgraffito

In visual arts, sgraffito was used mainly in ceramics and paintings. With the aid of a sharp tools, artists would incise or scratch decorations over a

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Sgraffito

Art technique involving scratching

Sgraffito (Italian:[zɡrafˈfiːto]; pl.sgraffiti) is an artistic or decorative technique of scratching through a coating on a hard surface to reveal parts of another underlying coating which is in a contrasting colour. It is produced on walls by applying layers of plaster tinted in contrasting colours to a moistened surface, and on pottery by applying two successive layers of contrasting slip or glaze to an unfired ceramic body.^[1] The Italian past participlesgraffiato is also used for this technique, especially in reference to pottery.

Etymology

The term sgraffito is based on the verb graffiare 'to scratch', which probably entered Italian through Lombardic and ultimately traces back to the Greek word gráphein 'to write'. The Italian prefix 's-' originates in the Latin prefix 'ex-', and is used in this case to intensify the basic meaning, so that 'to scratch' becomes 'to scratch off'.

History

Sgraffito on walls has been used in Europe since classical times. It was popular