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CERAMIC DECORATION
1951 - 1953
In general, Skov
alternated between working with oil painting and on drawings, using a wide
variety of media including pencil, charcoal, India ink, crayons and color
pencils, and sometimes combinations of any two or three of these. However,
during a twenty month period from 1951 to 1953, he turned to a different
medium altogether, the decorative design and glazing of ceramic plates and
bowls, returning as it were to his much earlier experience with ceramics
decoration from his childhood. During his childhood in Middelfart, and
later as a teenager in Strib, he had enjoyed unlimited access to work in
his father’s ceramics factory; and he was very well acquainted with the
production of porcelain and ceramics as well as with the techniques of
decoration using several layers of differently colored glaze with
intermittent firings.
Skov’s impulse to
return to work with clay and ceramic glazes resulted from his trip back to
his parent’s home in Strib in connection with his mother’s death in the
autumn of 1951. After attending his mothers funeral, and helping his
father, then 80 years old, relocate into a smaller house in Strib, he
decided to visit his oldest friends from the formative years of study and
travel in Munich and Switzerland, the sculptor and ceramist Anker
Noerregaard and his wife Kama, who at that time had a ceramics workshop in
Nykoebing-Falster. The first series of Skov’s ceramic decorations were made
here during a period of several month-long stays in late 1951; a period
when he was alone with his friends and away from his painting and family
while mourning his mother’s death.
During 1952 he was
invited to continue this work in the ceramics workshop of Graae’s Studio in
Copenhagen. The larger part of his ceramic decorations were
made there. In all, Skov completed about 650 individual pieces of decorated
ceramics, mostly plates and bowls of various sizes from about 20 cm to 50
cm in diameter. The decorations consist of line drawings with glazing of
contrasting white, light blue or black color on a background of the
ochre-yellow or burgundy-red burnt clay. In addition, Skov would sometimes
also apply a transparent glaze as partial outlines of the figures, or over
certain areas of the ceramic pieces, in order to obtain the effect of
adding shadow or space perception to the drawings.
For the application
of the decorative glazing to the fired ceramics,
Skov worked with the classic “Barbotine method”, using a cow horn
with
a goose feather inserted in its tip and filled with glaze. This
ancient ceramic decorating technique which is known from as far back as
archaic Egypt and
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