Eric James Mellon is a ceramic artist who specializes in using ash glaze

Ash glaze

Ash glazes are ceramic glazes which were formulated from wood-ash .-Appearance:The glaze has glasslike and pooling characteristics which puts emphasis on the surface texture of the piece being glazed. When the glaze is mostly made up of ash, the final result is mostly dark brown to green. The pots...

 and underglaze

Underglaze

Underglaze is a method of decorating ceramic articles, the decoration is applied to the surface before it is glazed. Because the glaze will subsequently cover it such decoration is completely durable, but because the subsequent glost firing is at a higher temperature than used in on-glaze...

 graphic drawings of figures.

Biography

Trained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. The school has an outstanding international reputation, and is considered one of the world's leading art and design institutions...

 in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 (1945–47), he was awarded his National Diploma in Design: Illustration (1947). In the early 1950s he set up an artistic community at Hillesden

Hillesden

Hillesden is a village and is also a civil parish within Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is in the very north of the county, about four miles south of Buckingham.The village name is Anglo Saxon in origin, and means 'Hild's hill'...

, Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....

, with his friend Derek Davis

Derek Davis (artist)

Derek Maynard Davis was an English artist, working in the media of painting and pottery. He was born in Wandsworth, South London, where he was educated at Emanuel School. He joined the King's Royal Rifle Corps in 1943, to fight in the World War II. After the war he entered the Central School of...

 and others. In 1956 he married the artist Martina Thomas and the following year moved to a house he built at Bognor Regis

Bognor Regis

Bognor Regis is a seaside resort town and civil parish in the Arun district of West Sussex, on the south coast of England. It is south-south-west of London, west of Brighton, and south-east of the city of Chichester. Other nearby towns include Littlehampton east-north-east and Selsey to the...

 in West Sussex

West Sussex

West Sussex is a county in the south of England, bordering onto East Sussex , Hampshire and Surrey. The county of Sussex has been divided into East and West since the 12th century, and obtained separate county councils in 1888, but it remained a single ceremonial county until 1974 and the coming...

, where he still lives.

Development of Work

In 1958 he was introduced to making stoneware, and since that time he has devoted his life mainly to the research of decorating stoneware pots with figurative drawings and glazing them with ash glazes. By using ash glazes he joined the tradition of craft potters established in the early decades of the twentieth century by Bernard Leach

Bernard Leach

Bernard Howell Leach, CBE, CH , was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the "Father of British studio pottery"-Biography:...

, followed by Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie

Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie

Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie was a pioneer in modern English Studio pottery....

. Pursuing that tradition, in recent years he has solved the problem of an excess of calcium in ash from trees and has been using ash obtained from bean plants—which is higher in potassium and permits the drawings to be 'held' at stoneware temperatures, c. 1250 degrees Celsius.

His work is featured in several books about ceramics, notably Phil Rogers

Phil Rogers

Philip John Rogers is a former breaststroke swimmer who competed in three consequentive Summer Olympics for Australia, starting in 1992....

, Ash Glazes - Second Edition (A & C Black & University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) and Paul Foster (Ed.,) Eric James Mellon: Ceramic Artist (University College Chichester, 2000). In 2007 the University of Chichester will publish a large quarto volume in full colour which will explain his work and report his research into ash glazes.