Tyler Fritz – Gillian McMillan — Rara Avis https://www.gillianmcmillan.com Mon, 10 Jan 2022 22:25:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 fortheloveofmudd https://www.gillianmcmillan.com/blog/2021/10/30/fortheloveofmudd/ https://www.gillianmcmillan.com/blog/2021/10/30/fortheloveofmudd/#comments Sun, 31 Oct 2021 02:59:04 +0000 https://www.gillianmcmillan.com/blog/?p=11753

Tyler Fritz’ Instagram handle is ‘fortheloveofmudd’ and, while following his posts, I discovered that he seems to have an enormous selection of historic pots. It turns out that his main interest is the finding and marketing of all things Mid-Century Modern and along with his research on those paintings, prints and furnishings he has come across lots of secondary market ceramics from that period. 

Thomas Kakinuma was a much-loved pottery teacher at UBC and the show at West Vancouver Museum  (my blog of February 2018 describes the show) and Debra Sloan’s recent talk about him for Burnaby Village Museum has made his works very collectible now.

https://www.gillianmcmillan.com/2018/02/16/thomas-kakinuma/

https://www.burnabyvillagemuseum.ca/EN/main/what-s-on/events-activities/neighbourhood-speaker-series-8.html

Tyler often finds the smaller whimsical TK pieces in Thrift stores and Antique markets. When I spotted some on His Instagram page I must have mentioned that I’d love to have one of his birds. Tyler kindly invited me to come by his suite one day and he’d let me have one, and he’d also allow me to see his collection of Mid to Late Twentieth Century BC pottery.

I made a plan to swing by his home after the emptying of the Shadbolt soda kiln on Tuesday. People collect things.. but Tyler lives to collect, study and exist with his collection. He invited me in to his suite where one can step back sixty years and imagine you’re in Vancouver of 1960. Paintings, prints, lamps, stuffed chairs.. all are MCM vintage, and the pots are everywhere! Somehow his children manage to live alongside them safely! He reassured me that he was totally comfortable with my taking photos and sharing them here. He says it’s important for people who have saved their pottery for decades to know that there is now a viable secondary market for BC ceramics and that there’s lots of history therein.

After I left I realized that he does not have any pottery or sculptures that aren’t stoneware. Colourful work isn’t part of his collection. There were ceramic artists making work that was earthenware back then, whether maiolica or slip-ware, and more colourful stoneware, before the nineties but I think that the influence of NSCAD via students attending that East Coast college began about then. Jane Williams was making a range of functional traditional slipware with Haney clay, Kathryn Youngs made maiolica-style ware and Fredi Rahn intrigued me with her unusual multi-coloured functional forms, but I saw just one slipped plate and Tyler confessed that it is Mexican.

Nevertheless the collection is a treasure trove of history. There was a bank of pots from Alberta potters, including Ed Drahanchuk, and several of those potters wound up moving to BC to teach here. My Douglas College instructor Fred Owen was taught in Edmonton by Walter Drohan. I was gobsmacked at the number and quality of pots I was seeing. My first pottery teacher when I lived in Kitsilano, Avery Huyghe, was featured, along with fine samples of Thomas Kakinuma’s work of course. Other potters who I remember fondly or are still around are represented in the collection.. Andrew Wong, Sam Kwan, Don Hutchinson, Hiro Urikami, Bob Kingsmill, Tam Irving, Ron Vallis .. oh too many to mention. Kinichi Shigeno’s pieces are admittedly more colourful.. perhaps Tyler’s collection needs better lighting.

There is a little shrine to temmoku with a vast early lamp base by Tam Irving. There are rows of yunomi, shelves with little sculptures, every ledge is filled with his treasures. Oh my, I found a large olive green vase that I’d carved with overlapping leaves snuggled in with pots by my heroes!

I’ll just let you browse my photos and you might like to enlarge some to see if you can figure out who made what. Tyler posts photos of pieces in his collection all the time so I recognized some from having seen them on Instagram. He sells duplicate or spare pots on his other site: westcoastclayartsales, but keeps the top quality pieces for his collection.

Thank-you Tyler for allowing me to wander through your home and take a trip down memory lane, and thank you also for insisting on giving me the cheery little TK bird.

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