Stan Bitters is a master ceramicist who’s been plying his craft for more than 50 years.
He likes to play with scale, producing large pieces for massive installations, but he’s equally adept at small and inexpensive birdhouses and lanterns. Mostly, he’s interested in preserving the organic, clay-like nature of his material – and with it, showing that we still have roots reaching back to prehistoric days.
“My interest has always been in the environmental condition of architecture,” he says. “And in doing that I try to get beyond the teacup – and relate to the environment, whether the project is residential or commercial.”
He got his start in 1958 as a kind of artist-in-residence at the Hans Sumph Co., at the time the largest maker of adobe brick in the U.S. He was trained as a painter, but the company wanted him to work on a potter’s wheel. He wound up doing very little on the wheel, but a great deal of hand-building.
“I was given 20 tons of material to play with, and it felt wonderful wading through it,” he says. “I started with birdhouses, then sculptures, and finally murals.”
His two-and three-dimensional installations for indoors or out are often attached to welded steel armatures where his tiles are hung. They’re both temporary and mobile. “If you move, you can take it with you,” he says.
Indeed. One of his monolithic sculptures was shipped from his studio near Fresno, cross the country to New York, where it was craned 60 floors up for installation.
He wants his clients to be confronted with the size of the pieces so they can’t escape being involved. “I want them mesmerized by looking over the surfaces,” he says. “When there’s an involvement at a six-foot height, they’re really confronting something larger.”
Relentless, he’s putting his bronze foundry back together now, so that he’ll be known in the future as more than just a ceramic artist.
But how many pieces has he’s produced over the years?
“How deep is the ocean?” he asks.
To find out, the curious need go no further than Heath Ceramics’ Boiler Room in San Francisco, where Bitters’s work remains on display through July 14.
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