Terry Green

     Working as an Architect for over 40 years, designing buildings, built an intuitive base for the shapes and forms of my work. I began my career working for a Japanese Architect. Direct approaches designing building without ornament was preferred over Post Modernism, which was a popular palate of the time. This minimalist approach balanced with a desire for honesty in form set the direction throughout my career designing a variety of building types throughout the Western United States, South America and China.

     Now in my final years of my career, I am joining my artist wife in our Sea Ranch ceramics studio where she is teaching me about the properties of clay; how it behaves when you hand-build objects and how it evolves as it’s fired and glazed. I am enjoying the hand-building process as it reminds me of Architectural model building. The Bottles + Vessels series shapes came from the desire to draw from the influences of my career in Architecture, the desire to create objects that are simple in design and possess the clarity in form that I have always been drawn to.

     The designs are restrained by my affinity towards minimalism. The shapes are simple, clean uncluttered objects. The penetration of the cylinder through the pieces brings lightness and balance to the work and a sort of emptiness. The work lacks ornamentation because ornamentation is too excessive and emotional, and it detracts from the essence of the art itself. So pure form is desired. Simple textures are added like Architectural materiality emphasizing the shape of the forms. On some of the works the geometries of the composition are expressed through lines carved from the clay body.  A strong focus on the basic elements are found in my series of Bottles and Vessels.