The potters wheel keeps on turning

Oct 8 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Few people look forward to restarting their career well after the usual age of retirement. Potter Julia Carter Preston is in that select group and is raring to go. Peter Elson reports

ON ARRIVING for tea at the Carter Preston residence, in Liverpool’s Georgian quarter, there is no doubt you are immersed in the Capital of Culture months ahead of schedule.

A dresser, groaning under its pay-load of exquisite classical Greek crockery like a grounded Argo, forms a backdrop as sherries and fortified wines flow across a beautifully inlaid antique circular dining table. Even the crisps are served on a silver salver.

When her husband Michael Pugh-Thomas asks if she’d have a glass of the Sainsbury sweet sherry, she declines, preferring the Tio Pepe dry.

“I’m upgrading my taste to help the European Capital of Culture ambience,” she explains.

But the mere continent of Europe is not big enough to contain Julia Carter Preston’s artistic decor. Chinese lions, Japanese vases and screens add to the luxuriant air of culture.

Many watercolours by her father, sculptor Edward Carter Preston, cover the walls. He also collected the Oriental pieces when Liverpool was awash with such artefacts from the Far East trade from 1900 until the war.

His bust of Nelson, based on the Admiral’s death-mask for HMS Conway’s figure head, confidently gazes across the room, unimpeded by lack of body, never mind arm and eye.

Julia’s signature pieces of ceramic pottery with their beautiful idiosyncratic sgraffito work derive from techniques that originated in ancient Egypt and the Middle East.

One of her latest pieces was commissioned as a present to the Prince of Wales when he reopened St George’s Hall in April.

So effective is her work that one self-appointed antiques dealer, touring her 1830s-built home some years ago, stopped in his tracks seeing a plate hanging on the wall.

“Where on earth did you get that?” he gasped. “It’s worth a fortune as they’re so hard to find. It’s a rare piece of Japanese dok.”

Julia was able to reply in all truth: “I made it myself.”

Her husband Michael Pugh-Thomas chimes in: “Yes, it’s an original piece of Julia doc.”

Much chuckling results as we view the plate still hung in the first-floor living room, and Julia giggles: “He was a bit put out by all this.”

While it’s unlikely that the “Julia doc” production line will fire up, the artist herself is preparing to return to her minute studio at the Bluecoat Arts Centre before Christmas to resume her sgraffito work.

She had to vacate this haven – a former 18th-century laundry and coal store – while the centre underwent its two-year long renovation and decamped to Hope University College, but can’t wait to get back and literally get stuck into the clay.

“I’m told my studio is going to be a heritage site,” she laughs, causing Michael to add: “When Julia goes back, she’s got to wear a smock and mop cap.”

She may be the only one of her kind in Britain, with a worldwide order book stretching to the limit of her working life, but she’s not doing it for the money.

“Hardly anyone wants to spend as many hours as I do on a pot,” she says. As her accountant likes to remind her, she works well below the minimum wage level. She says: “I told him that I thought in fact I was working for £1.50 an hour, but he wasn’t amused.”

That said, she is enthusias-tically promoted on BBC TV’s Antiques Roadshow by experts like Tim Wonnacott, who advises viewers to stash away Carter Preston originals for their children’s inheritance.

Fretting that her skills have stagnated, she is in the reverse mode to retirement. Once more the Carter Preston potter’s wheel will spin and the kilns will be turned up to 1,145 blistering degrees.

If she has her way, she will get back up to speed for six-hour days, seven days a week, creating exquisite bowls and plates. It must be a withdrawal symptom from inhaling clay dust for nearly 60 years.

Impeccably connected to Liverpool’s artistic elite, her father, Edward, who was responsible for Liverpool Cathedral’s interior sculpture and carving (from 1931 to 1965), worked until the night before he died. Her mother was also artistically gifted.

Edward painted watercolours to relax when he wasn’t sculpting at this studio in a converted coach house (now demolished) behind the family’s Georgian home at 88 South Bedford Street (now the University’s Latin American Studies department).

He also designed a host of national medals including the World War I Victory, Next of Kin, Distinguished Flying Cross and Queen’s Seal medals. The house was a magnet for leading artists, including Liverpool Cathedral’s architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

Two years ago, Julia was made a Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University and was rather vexed by the university’s Chancellor, Cherie Blair, telling her that “pottery must be a very interesting hobby”.

No doubt, but in Julia’s case it is a lifelong vocation. It has led to exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and retrospectives at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.

Prices per item start at around £300, but one of her bowls has sold for £3,500 to a Texan collector.

The youngest of four sisters, who were all artistic, Julia started making pottery as she says “probably because there was not much else to do”.

When she crept into her father’s studio while he was working, he told her: “You’ve got to be quiet, so get some clay out of the bin and make something.”

And apart from flirting with the idea of farming (killing livestock was not to her taste) she has never looked to any other career.

The ecclesiastical links continue as Julia made fonts for St John’s Fairfield, St Laurence’s Kirkdale, St Austin’s Grassendale and the Church of the Holy Family, Southport.

Her uncle, the renowned Liverpool sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith and her father (who was a much more private and serious person) worked on just one medal together, commemorating the Battle of Jutland.

They were both involved with the Sandon Society of Artists, who originally established the Bluecoat arts centre from 1908, in the former school buildings of 1717.

Julia’s face is said to the one used in sculptures above window arches during the postwar restoration and Herbert also created the cartouche over the main entrance.

“Uncle Herbert was a disgraceful character, but told very entertaining, scandalous stories and therefore was very popular,” says Julia.

“Every night during the wartime air raids he slept in the Bluecoat’s back garden, next to his studio, and saved the Bluecoat from burning down by single-handedly putting out a fire.

“When he was told how brave he was, he dismissed this, saying ‘Nonsense, you just throw water and sand on the fire until it goes out.’

“But he had a very noble streak, taking several totally deaf boys and trained them. One of them, Jim McLaughlin, is probably the best letter carver in Britain.”

Uncle Herbert, creator of Liverpool, Birkenhead and Southport cenotaphs, chiselled on until he was 90.

“People use this age thing as a shield, but it’s like being pigeon-holed and told you must stop as you’re 60 or 70,” says Julia.

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk

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