John Minnion ceramic sculpture

Retired newspaper illustrator who has recently discovered there is a third dimension

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Citadel

Just sold this. It lights up very nicely with a tea candle.

The colour is halfway between these two photo versions.

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Moorish building

 You can keep a small harem inside it. (It's about 3 inches square.)

Angela Byrne:  That's a very small harem then.

Hellen McGregor:  I don't think you would keep them for long without a pleasure garden and fountains to go with...

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Doorway ceramics


I want to make one of these for most of the rooms in the house, to sit above the doors. The owl is for Sandra’s office, the second one of course is a unisex toilet. Decoration is enamel paints.

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Bored bassist

Top: before glaze firing. Bottom: finished, with strings attached. 
 Based on a sketch from a RLPO rehearsal. I was amused at the way the double bassists lean on their instruments with bored, sardonic expressions while Maestro Petrenko discusses minute details with the violinists. 


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Vase of squares

Well some of them are rectangles. About 24 cm high

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Mallorcan village

A relief ceramic, almost an illustration. Based on a sketch drawn in Deia, where Robert Graves lived out his later life.

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Citadel

Constructed in a square spiral. The wonderful groggy clay makes it seem as if this was built of sand.

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Simple dwelling with figures

About 6cm square with tiny figures. I imagine this somewhere in a desert. The figures seem to be wearing Islamic dress

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Ruined cottage with evil cat

This can be lit with a tealight, thus:

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Owls in a ruined abbey

...and you can light a tealight inside to make it more spooky

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Desk tidy

A thing for keeping things in, like pens, pencils, scissors, nailfile... or it can be a three-part vase. Though I didn’t glaze it, so dried flowers only.

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Square spiral vase

This is only a few centimetres high but I made the scale ambiguous by adding a few small figures steadily climbing a stepped path all the way to the top.

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Le Boeuf sur le Toit

Tableau based on an animation I made of Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit

Here is the Ox on the rooftop, dancing a tango with his lady ox.

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SONATA

I had in mind Claude Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, a most beautiful piece of chamber music  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRzWGIhwWAI

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Jazz trio

I thought this was a more ceramic approach to depicting musicians (though these photos are a bit hard to read). The cymbal is glued on a a wire stand. I painted white tin glaze on their suits and it came out blotchy - which I now realise was predictable.

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Jazz band

Just trying things out. The shiny bits were not glazes; they were painted on with enamel paint after firing, and then varnished.

The starting point for this was a sketch of the Blue Magnolia Jassband playing their weekly gig in Mossley Hill.

The next version of it was an ink drawing...

...before launching into the clay version – which is, I must admit, a rather clumsy hybrid between illustration and ceramic.