Ben Owen’s ‘Chinese Red’ ceramics glaze is the fire-engine polish every girl has once painted on her toes, the flagrant crimson of horror flick blood and of thick habanero hot sauce. It’s ruddier than North Carolina’s clay earth, more azalea than rose.

When I visited Owen’s gallery in Seagrove, N.C. while studying pottery in college, the red so stunned me that I later tried to recreate it in class. I spent one long night bent over a glaze recipe and powered chemicals like a mad scientist, breathing stale, rubber-tinted air through a gas mask. (The result was more burgundy than crimson.) It would have been a miracle had I mastered the glaze in one night. ‘Chinese Red,’ it turns out, had been researched and perfected over years by Owen’s father, also a potter, and second in a line of three Ben Owens.

The youngest Owen also makes ‘Chinese Blue,’ originally concocted by his grandfather. The glaze is copper-enriched and produces a color varying from a milky turquoise to a deep maroon. In most cases both colors appear simultaneously in an airbrushed pattern, an effect produced by different firing methods and variations in the glaze’s application. Owen makes shapes specifically for the use of this blue: elongated vases with large lips, some handle-less, some slightly squared near the neck, and a few with rounder chests, small handles and simple incised embellishments evoking the vase styles of ancient Greece.

Tradition defines every pot that comes through Owen’s kiln—the traditions of his North Carolinian forefathers, and as the glazes indicate, Asian influences that have for generations inspired the shapes and colors of Seagrove pottery. “My family has been interested in pottery from the Orient since the 1920s,” Owen told me in a rooted Eastern Carolina accent. “Country potters used to make things for everyday life, like jugs for storage. My grandfather, while he was working for Jugtown, looked at the Orient and began making decorative designs, away from utilitarian purpose.” Owen had previously traveled to Japan in order to immerse himself in the culture that had inspired his grandfather, who embraced the simplicity of Asian artistic traditions: “It’s easy to make things complicated,” he would say. “The challenge is to keep things simple.”

The youngest Ben Owen was born in 1968, and as a boy wore a shaggy haircut and an eager smile. He is photographed with his grandfather, a large man in a plaid shirt, walking to the ceramics studio, a place he had visited after school since the age of eight to learn a new lesson each day from his grandfather’s hand. He learned the intricacies of pot-turning—how to cut a foot, for example, and how each glaze interacts with fire from a wood, electric, or salt kiln. In other words, he learned to be a chef: “You have to find utensils that work the best with the food you’re cooking.”

After imitating the forms his grandfather had taught him, he experimented with new styles but never strayed too far. “It’s like any kind of foundation you build upon. Each pot is a sketch for the next one, taking influences from the past to a new direction in the future.” Owen’s pottery is so desired that pieces have been commissioned by Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan, and Bob Hope, among others. His new creations include large-scale pots for public installations such as the Ritz Carlton in Tokyo and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, raising Owen to the kind of notoriety his forefathers never could have imagined. Nor would have his Seagrove contemporaries, many of whom are also the third, fourth or fifth carriers of their namesake.

Families who once made pottery as their sole source of income lost work around the turn of the century, when new industrial methods could turn out a container with little cost and effort. Socialite couple Jacques and Juliana Busbee became saviors of Seagrove, setting up a store in Greenwich Village, New York where they sold utilitarian ceramics made by potters including Owen’s great-grandfather Rufus and his brother James. A few years later Jugtown Pottery was built to house the artists turning pots for the Busbee’s venture. Ben Owen Sr. became the sole Jugtown potter by 1932 and produced ceramics there for over 36 years.

Owen Sr. would be proud of his grandson, whose latest contribution to the family tree is little Avery Claire, now almost the same age her father was when he first learned to turn a pot. And her daddy, who this year turns 40, has already been named a “North Carolina Living Treasure,” an honor he humbly accepts. “It’s a responsibility,” Owen said. “I have to do the best I can, and reach out and nurture other potters. It’s a responsibility to uphold the quality of what I continue to do in the future.”

>Written by d/visible contributor Meredith Veto.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Culture, Profile, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.