Edwin Scheier
New Hampshire, Arizona / Puerto Rico, Mexico, (1910-2008)
Glazed Earthenware Bowl
An amazing creative couple (Edwin Scheier and his wife Mary Goldsmith Scheier) were partners in life and work, thoroughly dedicated to making pottery and active in many other creative endeavours for many decades. Edwin learned his arts/ crafts as an apprentice with a silversmith, an Austrian ceramicist and a Sicilian puppeteer; and he and Mary traveled and worked as WPA artists, as puppeteers across the country, as instructors of ceramic techniques at the University of New Hampshire, as gatherers of cultural information/ techniques/ designs in Oaxaca, Mexico, in Puerto Rico to promote ceramics, and more. They learned how to make ceramics on their own when they were given use of a kiln, and they built their own pottery wheels from car and sewing machine parts. The main themes from their work are humanistic and organic: life, birth, and rebirth of both people and animals, and their work often blurs the line between art and craft. When Edwin could no longer lift clay and throw pottery, in his 90s he began learning and making computer artwork until his death at 97 (Mary worked beside him until age 96).

In a decorative rim encircling this beautifully thrown dark-toned earthenware bowl, Edwin Scheier lightly carved (with the sgraffito technique) a series of multiple wondrous mid-century figures. Attractive human faces are split into two identical symmetrical parts, and smaller faces appear out of them between the two parts in a kind of fantastical abstract miraculous birthlike fashion. And between each face-themed composition, there is a fish being held by two clapsed hands.

Signed underneath
Height: 5 inches; Diameter: 8 inches