Kurt Anderson receivedd his BA in Education from the University of Wyoming in 1994 and his MFA in ceramics from Louisiana State University in 1997. His adept touch with clay is evident in his simple , semi-loosely thrown forms which are adorned with a vocabulary of images, inspired by his varied interests.
Anderson states, "Godzilla movies were my earliest source of artistic inspiration. As a child I used to love to draw scenes of Godzilla crashing through cityscapes, army men, tanks, and airplanes harassing him along the way. I found this visual stew a ready source for my own artistic endeavors. I would saturate a piece of paper with lines and squiggles and marks, revealing a childish distrust of negative space.
"My most recent work seems to have re-embraced this attitude about composition and space. The surfaces of my pots are saturated with incised lines and glaze, all but obliterating the whiteness of the porcelain background. My sources for imagery are varied: comic books, modern painters, street artists, logos and iconography. For the stylized flowers I look at Tz’u-chou type wares from China and the pottery of Ogata Kenzan. I seem to gravitate towards simple line drawings, the type of lines that can easily be incised onto the surfaces of my pottery."
"As for the choices I make in the composition of my work, I have devised a system to randomly generate a series of images. On to small pieces of paper I have drawn the different characters I work with, i.e., birds, robots, lions, giraffes, the pope, etc, and placed them into a jar. I then start pulling pieces of paper from the jar, and my composition is slowly assembled. I like to generate these compositions randomly so as to avoid any narrative content or “statement” my pots might convey. I am not trying to tell a story, but the viewer might derive their own narrative from my imagery. I am okay with this."
"As for form, I use utility and function as my guidelines. I am certainly influenced by the Leach/ McKenzie pottery phalanx that American studio potters tend to embrace. At this point, however, I am placing most of my emphasis on surface, and the form of the vessel, though more than just an afterthought, is little more than a vehicle for my surface compositions. The form is serving the surface, and any attention the form takes away from the surface, either positively or negatively, is doing a disservice to the overall purpose of the vessel."
