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Clarice Cliff the Stoke on Trent born art deco designer, revolutionised British pottery. It was the 1920's the decade of the Depression, when Cliff created of what was to become the unmistakably famous of all her designs called Bizarre.
The odd shaped defective wares that went with the newly acquired Newport Pottery factory,presented an interesting challenge for Cliff. She covered the imperfections of the vast stock of wares with vividly rich coloured hand paintings and boldly innovated it with geometric triangles with on glaze enamels that made the pieces even more brightly coloured.
She said "color seems to radiate happiness and the spirit of modern life". And that was what she created with her pottery. A sense of joy and limitless possibilities. According to her the British wives deserved a bit more gaiety in their lives.
If you have an eye for the collectable you wouldn't want to miss a Clarice Cliff made sugar sifters, biscuit barrels, sauce boats, conical shaped coffee pots, jampots, vases, bowls,statuettes, toby and lotus jugs, plates and tea sets.If the piece has a back stamp that says Clarice Cliff Newport Pottery England or Royal Staffordshire Ceramic/Dinnerware by Clarice Cliff then you have a collectible.
Cliff made roughly 700 designs in her lifetime. Her range of patterns like Applique, Inspiration, Fantasque, Crocus and of course Bizarre are among her most commercially successful.
A lot of design pundits in those days considered Cliff an aberration. For them, Cliff's artistic merits were arguable. Even Queen Mary dismissed Cliff's unconventional work "awful". Oh well, Cliff's creations may not look very refined to royalty but heck, Clarice was a free spirit.
She instructed her team of hand paintresses ( Bizarre girls) to make the paint thick and make the upward brushstrokes very obvious(which was at the time going against the rules). The Bizarre shop produced seemingly hand done wares for they never did the same thing twice.
More than eighty years since the heydays of Clarice Cliff, her ceramic pieces nowadays may fetch from $100 to $20,000. Cliff definitely captured the zeitgeist of her times. What's so amazing about this gifted woman is that.... to this day her work remains very collectible.
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