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Ceramic Art: The new zen
Why did the «New York Times» write that it is the «new yoga»?
Y
ou will have seen it on Instagram or a friend will have told you: Ceramic art is gaining ground as a hobby. Not only because it resembles meditation and gives space to our creativity, but also it restores our relationship with touch, soil and fire, away from screens.
With its inception lost in the prehistoric times, it thrived during the Greek antiquity in an inspired verve of shapes, colours, figures. Storage-jars, amphoras, kraters, jugs, and lekythoi reflect the everyday habits and the traditions of the society that produced them and they give evidence about that society, as pottery accounts for the most numerous objects of the same category found in any archaeological excavation.
When you put your hands to clay, the natural inclination to form, shape, and ultimately create something from the fine-grained soil is inescapable. Ceramics are perhaps the most ubiquitous of all art forms to have emerged from human history. The art of ceramics has endured for eons, with a rich legacy of thousands of years of creation and know-how, passed down from generation to generation.
In the modern era, new morphologic and technical features have been added to making ceramics. Earthenware
Ceramics (derived from «Keramos», Greek for «potter’s clay») is one of the most ancient industries going back thousands of years. Even though there is a long history of ceramic art in almost all developed cultures, it particularly thrived during Greek antiquity in an inspired verve of shapes, colors, and figures. In fact, many art critics consider Greek pottery to represent the zenith of ceramic art; but despite the aesthetic achievements of many outstanding Greek ceramicists, the plastic art of pottery in Classical Antiquity was never as widely respected as fine art.
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