San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts

Sparks: The Ceramic Art of Peter Callas

Peter Callas is one of America’s foremost expressionist sculptors working in clay. He utilizes the anagama kiln to produce large scale forms in the tradition of abstract expressionism. He is credited with bringing the first anagama and the technique of prolonged wood firing for aesthetic affects to America in 1976. About this time he also began working collaboratively with the preeminent American clay artist Peter Voulkos. For many years he fired Voulkos’s work in his New Jersey kiln and traveled extensively worldwide with Voulkos as his assistant. Today Peter Callas is considered to be one of America’s foremost authorities on the wood fire anagama kiln tradition.
Callas has developed his own unique style and made his mark on the woodfiring scene with pots as well as sculpture. The beauty of wood-fired ceramics lies in subtlety, abstraction, asymmetry, and imperfection. Pieces that are fired in this way have an ancient look about them, as if they had been sitting on the bottom of the sea for thousands of years. “The process of wood firing ceramics, for over three decades, has been the creative touchstone that changed the course of my life,” said Callas in a written statement. Peter Callas has had numerous one-man shows and museum exhibitions worldwide.
He has exhibited extensively in Korea, Japan and Norway and his works are in museum collections in those countries as well as in Hungary, Brazil and numerous American museums.


Pictured Above:

Peter Callas in his studio
Belvidere, New Jersey