Ian Steele: Artist's Statement

In the late 50's when I studied at Vancouver School of Art, it was still the custom to learn basic anatomy as you drew or painted.  This had the effect of imposing a balance on all ones' work relative to the way the body functioned.  This was just as important an influence on making pottery as it was in drawing or painting landscapes - even the sort of decaying industrial structures that I was fond of at the time, now replaced by apartment blocks and smart market places. Bernard Leach used to talk about the head, neck, shoulder, waist, foot, of a pot and relating various parts of the pots to the human figure made good sense to me.  It still does.

After 45 years there is still the feeling of being a student and needing to learn more, try things out. It is not so much trying new shapes as re-defining.  This has been a continuous process but I have more time for it now.  The same it true of drawing.  My drawing is much influenced by my attitude towards pottery, being generally uncluttered and direct.  This tends to result in 3 kinds of drawings.  Ones that work and I think are acceptable to other people. Ones that work for me and get put away for a while (these tend to be drawings where I have experimented and I need to look at them from time to time to re-appraise them).  Then there are the ones that don't work for me and they find their way into a shreader and become part of a slab pot.

My use of colour is entirely according to how I feel at the time.  Sometimes I see the figure in terms of reflected light, either as line or areas.  The colour might be used to define or diffuse; bring something forward or push it back, but very rarely to represent - I have never seen a model with a blue arm.  However, quite often I use no colour at all, or at least so little that it just becomes part of the black.

Occasionally some of the drawings, or parts of them, become somewhat abstract.  Pottery does the same thing, whether functional or not, as it takes an abstract shape with the only restriction on that shape being its function.

The two disciplines work for me because of their commonality, not because of their differences.