Panagiotis (Peter) Harry Voulkos, ceramic artist: born Bozeman, Montana 29 January 1924; married first Peggy Cone (one daughter; marriage dissolved), second Ann Adair (one son); died Bowling Green, Ohio 16 February 2002. He transformed the craft of pottery into an art.After setting out as a studio potter making high-quality, well- designed tableware, Voulkos was inspired by the powerful concepts of the abstract expressionist painters in the early Fifties. Deciding that ceramics needed “a kick in the pants”, he started to build large, vibrant, craggy and anything but polite vessel forms on the wheel that incorporated different wheel-thrown components. His work in clay remained vessel-based, whether tall, soaring stack forms or flattened platters with scored or torn markings. He enjoyed an anarchic reputation, both for his use of clay as a medium of artistic expression, and for his assertive, extrovert manner.There was little in his early years to indicate the rebel.

The third of five children born to Greek immigrant parents, Voulkos left Bozeman, his home town, at the age of 18 to work for the Western Foundry Company, in Oregon, helping to fabricate the floor moulds for engine castings used on American Liberty ships.During the war he served in the Pacific as an airline gunner. After the war as a student at Montana State College he started out as a painter, fascinated by the spontaneity and emotional power of painters such as Van Gogh and C?nne. He become interested in clay only in his final year at college when studying ceramics as a requirement for graduation and was immediately taken by its plastic, tactile qualities, and virtually abandoned painting.Mesmerised by the way clay offered “instant” possibilities, he approached it with the sensibilities of a painter rather than an artisan. His early conventional pots were as much three-dimensional drawings in space with a surface for mark-making as they were containers. Through clay Voulkos sought to explore the history of humankind.

On one occasion, as a student, after seeing a picture of a rice bottle he threw its shape on the wheel some 10 times larger than the original, a physical and metaphorical coming to terms with the visual rather than functional qualities of form.Following postgraduate study at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Voulkos worked at a brick factory run by Archie Bray in Helena, Montana (later known as the Archie Bray Foundation), where he set up a small studio making pots and firing beehive brick kilns. The production of well-thrown and -designed pots also helped sell more bricks, and the studio attracted visitors, including, in 1952, the potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, and the Japanese craft critic Soetsu Yanagi. During one demonstration Voulkos kicked the wheel while Hamada threw pots. While not particularly inspired by Leach or Hamada’s pots, he was impressed by their discussion of Eastern philosophies and the idea that accidents often yield greater vitality than perfect control.