Mad Potter Of The Ozarks madpotteroftheozarks.com

Greetings to The Mad Potter of the Ozarks page. This page is a way of informing anyone curious enough to come about how George Ohr has been an influence on work. Mr. Ohr, was a potter from the early twentieth century whose aesthetic sensibilities and pottery skills were way a head of his time. He has been called America’s first art potter. The madness in the title might have come from his eccentric and outlandish behavior and that his pots were very adventurous in his exploration of form and suggestion. I don’t think he was mad. I think he listened to his own inner vision and not to the marketplace. I also think he had terrific sense of humor, adventure, a tremendous facility and mastery of clay processes, and for invention.

I am not a scholar of George Ohr, but I am a great admirer of his fearless exploration of form and expression in his work and his playfulness. I decided to create a domain name to play with these ideas. In my mind I have decided that George Ohr and Marcel Duchamp are connected. One of Duchamp’s more interesting concepts, for me, is the one of the “serious joke” and I think that George Ohr may well have been on to that in his own way.