Artist Statement
When I was a young boy, my father took me to art museums. I remember looking at the objects in the glass cases. Specifically the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is where I would always go first, and get stuck. The objects grabbed me, held my gaze. They were treasures, true treasures to my little boy eyes…and I wanted them.
This early experience motivated my ceramics education. If only I could make something that was awesome like those things I saw in museums. It continues to drive me to this day.
My current works are bottle forms and serving bowls.
The bottle form comes naturally out of the fact that I started my ceramic training on the potter’s wheel. For twenty years all I did was throw forms on the wheel. My admiration for painting and sculpture eventually moved me away from conventional pottery toward experimentation. About that time my ceramics started to become a reflection of my inner world rather than the work I had been seeing around me.
My serving bowls and other tableware are as a response to my experience in culinary classes back in 2008, the year before my son was born. So overwhelmed with pleasure over this new interest, I found that I had to express it by creating ceramics that could become a part of that joy filled world of food and dining.
My functional ceramics tend to be an expression of my intuition rather than any effort to make objects based on common notions of tableware.
Therefore I find myself thinking of my functional pieces as art. My little treasures.
Contact: bryanweitzceramics@gmail.com
Instagram: bryanweitzceramics