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George Whitten | |
| Birth Date: 1949 |
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Artist Gallery |
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| George Whitten started as a potter, sculptor and abstract painter who made a living marketing his work outside of Ohio.
Whitten pots were featured in several movies and television shows. An interior design showroom in Miami that handled his work had an arrangement with the Miami Vice television series. It was basically a rental agreement, with an understanding that if the piece was broken in a fight scene or machine gun episode, it was upgraded from rental to purchase.
Whitten started off making pots with David Tell at Florida Atlantic University. He stayed after graduation to learn more about ceramics. Finally, Tell told him that he was ready for graduate school, and even arranged interviews for him at three. Whitten ended up going to Wichita State. After graduation in 1974, he accepted a teaching job at Ohio University in Athens. He stopped off in the vicinity of Mansfield to spend part of the summer with friends. By the time he got to Athens, the oil crisis was in full swing, and the job had been eliminated due to budget cuts.
So Whitten went back to the Amish country east of Mansfield, with the idea of establishing a studio. He hooked up with three friends in the area and together they started a co-op pottery. A sympathetic farmer provided an outbuilding which became their studio. A few years later, after the other potters moved on, the farmer announced he was ready to retire. Whitten bought the place and made his mark in the ceramic world with raku.
Whitten’s raku work exhibits a kind of radical originality, especially in the thrown pieces, decorating techniques and alterations. The large slab vessels however are another matter. They seem to be icons, effortlessly spanning the gap between postmodern Western art and a kind of Zen-like artifact from some distant past and time.
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