Delicate Transformation
December 2006
Most ceramic artists merely dream about being where Cliff Lee was three years ago. His pots were |
"Lotus with Flower," 2006, wheel-thrown porcelain. |
Lee, a former neurosurgeon, used the time off for rehabilitation and to design an elaborate 7,000-gallon koi pond between his house and studio. Now he spends less time in the studio and more with his family. When he feels his stress level rising, he goes out to the garden and gazes at the koi and lotus until serenity returns. “I want to make myself happy first,” he says. “If you can’t make yourself happy, you can’t make happy work.”
Yet his pots have become ever more intricate, and each year he gives himself a new set of challenges. “I realized life can just disappear,” Lee says. “I’m in a race with time, a race with myself. Whatever I’m doing, I want to do it to the best of my ability.”
Lee came to the U.S. from Taiwan at age 15, went to medical school, and was making a good living as a surgeon when, on a lark, he enrolled in a ceramics class at James Madison University (Harrisburg, Virginia) in 1976. There, he encountered the two loves of his life—studio pottery and his wife, jewelry designer Holly Lee. She supported his decision to leave medicine to pursue ceramics and continued to encourage him during the lean years that followed, as Lee struggled to perfect his techniques and establish a name for himself.
They moved to Amish country in central Pennsylvania when their sons were small and set up adjoining studios in the 200-year-old barn beside their house. There, Lee worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week. His big break came in 1990 when the Smithsonian Institute acquired his work. Three years later, his pottery was in the White House Collection of American Craft and Lee was earning serious money. A vase shaped like a peach on a pedestal can sell for $40,000.
Inside the Lees’ studio, sleigh bells dangle from a doorway to remind visitors to duck. “This place
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Cliff Lee at work in his studio. |
was designed for cows,” Lee reminds them. A sunny foyer filled with potted bonsai leads to office space; rooms for mixing, throwing, sculpting, firing and glazing; and a showroom that was once a hayloft. From his workbench, Lee looks out over acres of golden cornfields. The medical background was not completely wasted. His chemistry training comes in handy for mixing glazes, and his surgical dexterity is evident when he carves his pots and uses tweezers to attach tiny clay filaments. “Surgical implants!” he jokes.
Lee is known for two kinds of porcelain: intricately carved pots inspired by nature and sleek teardrop shapes narrowing to a slender stem. Both are rare, primarily because it’s so difficult to throw, carve and fire porcelain. The clay is powdery, dries quickly and collapses easily on the wheel. It has to be fired at high temperatures and often explodes. Even after 31 years, Lee loses up to 50 percent of his work during firing. Most porcelain pots are actually “porcelain-like white ware”; pure porcelain vessels rarely exceed six inches. Lee’s are often 15 inches, perfectly symmetrical and so graceful they appear to float.
His carved pieces take the form of cabbages, radishes, melons, peaches and lotus flowers and are so sheer that light shines through. Lee introduces a new theme each year. This year it’s dragons. By July, he had completed 10 dragon pots; six were sold to collectors before he began. Roaring dragons crouch on the lids, atop pots carved with stylized clouds. “Dragons are connected to all cultures,” he points out. His are in the Chinese tradition. “Mine don’t blow fire or have wings like European dragons, but they’re very fierce and sage-looking. Dragons need a majestic power to keep the evil spirits away.” He points out that in ancient China, only emperors were allowed to own depictions of these five-clawed Imperial creatures.
Lee carves with X-acto knives, dental tools and duct-taped saw blades. He has never had an assistant or hired work out. He does everything himself, from mixing the clay and glazes to carving and firing. “I make my machines do the work,” he says. “They don’t talk back.” Throwing and firing porcelain is too delicate a process to risk the ash and debris sometimes found in commercial clay, says Lee. He uses a stainless-steel mixing machine specially imported from Taiwan. Standard metal machines can rust and contaminate the clay.
Giant kilns take up one room of the barn—an 1,800-degree kiln for bisque and a 2,500-degree one for porcelain. Behind the artist’s workbench, a wall is lined with chemicals for glazes, and tables are piled with notebooks full of glaze formulas, scribbled in three different languages. Many a potter would love to have his formulas for celadon, Imperial yellow, ox blood, Kuan ware and crater glaze—all ancient, long-lost Chinese glazes he has reinvented over the years. “I concentrate on Chinese monochrome: one single high-fire glaze in a reduction firing—very difficult,” he says. “I’m always at the mercy of weather and gas and kiln.”
He is particularly proud of his crater or lava glaze, a rough-textured half-inch-thick glaze that looks exactly like it sounds. Lee applies it in several thin layers, then pulls the pots from the kiln at the exact moment the silicon carbide he adds begins to emit carbon gas and bubble to the surface. It took him 17 years to perfect this technique. His wife is especially fond of the lava pots, and many of his best examples can be found in their home.
Putting the final touches on his pots requires spending hours in awkward positions. Lee often leaves the studio with his back and arms aching. “People don’t realize how much struggle and pain goes into these pots,” he says, laughing. “But I’m a little crazy. I really like that kind of physical and mental challenge. I have so much I still want to accomplish.”
Cathleen McCarthy writes about contemporary crafts, collectibles, jewelry design and travel.