Covered Jar

While chair of the ceramics department at the Otis Art Institute (1954–1959), Peter Voulkos championed clay as an expressive, sculptural medium. Throughout this feverish period of experimentation in Los Angeles, he continued to throw functional pots with astonishing facility and innovation including this covered jar , which according to the artist dates around 1956–57. The vessel's shape, ornamentation, and brushwork exhibit a compilation of earlier traditional ceramic influences on Voulkos while anticipating future development in his work toward non-utilitarian sculptural forms of great personal expressiveness.

Flared foot, capped lid, and bulging body recall the elemental shapes of folk pottery in Korea, Japan, and colonial America, while the stencil patterns of abstracted birds and plants were influenced by the paper cutouts of the French master Henri Matisse. Loose handling of the slightly bulging cylindrical body, irregular profile of body and lid, and messy brushstrokes of the white slip (liquid clay) enlivening the vessel's surface suggest both the Zen idea of beauty in imperfection and the expressionist demonstrations of intuition and gesture of American Action Painting happening concurrently in New York.