Vitreous enamel, also called porcelain enamel, is a material made by fusing powdered glass to a substrate by firing, usually between 750 and 850 °C. The powder melts, flows, and then hardens to a smooth, durable vitreous coating. The word vitreous comes from the Latin vitreus, meaning "glassy".
Arthur F. Mathews was an American Tonalist painter who was one of the founders of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Trained as an architect and artist, he and his wife Lucia Kleinhans Mathews had a significant effect on the evolution of Californian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His students include Granville Redmond, Xavier Martinez, Armin Hansen, Percy Gray, Gottardo Piazzoni, Ralph Stackpole, Mary Colter, Maynard Dixon, Rinaldo Cuneo and Francis McComas.
Virgil David Cantini was an American enamelist, sculptor and educator. He was well known for innovation with enamel and steel and received both local and national recognition for his work, including honorary awards, competitive prizes and commissions, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Cantini long served as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, where he helped to create the Department of Studio Arts. A longtime resident of the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cantini died on May 2, 2009, at the age of 90. Today, many of his large scale works are on display throughout the city of Pittsburgh.
Robert Brady is an American modernist sculptor who works in ceramics and wood. Born in Reno, Nevada, he has made his home in the San Francisco Bay Area for many decades. Brady is a multi-faceted artist who works in ceramics, wood, painting, and illustration, and is best known for his abstract figurative sculptures. Brady came out of the California Clay movement, and the Bay Area Arts scene of the 1950s and 1960s, which includes artists such as Peter Voulkos, Viola Frey, Stephen de Staebler, and Robert Arneson who was his mentor and teacher in college.
William C. Harper is an NYC based American jewelry artist known for studio craft jewelry. Harper, an expert in the cloisonné technique working in enamelled glass, creates intricate pieces that combine enamel designs with gold, wood, and a variety of other materials, both valuable and ordinary. Instead of using cloisonné in the traditional way to separate areas of color, Harper utilizes silver and gold wires as a form of drawing, creating abstract linear patterns within the enamel. His work often explores the contrast between different elements, such as the beautiful and the everyday, the luxurious and the simple, and the public and the personal.
Stefan Knapp was a Polish painter and sculptor, who worked in Great Britain. He developed and patented a technique of painting with enamel paint on steel, facilitating decorating public architectural structures.
Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
John Paul Miller was an American jewellery designer and goldsmith, who also produced films, photographs and paintings. Stephen Harrison, decorative arts curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, compares Miller's work with that of René Lalique and Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Clayton George Bailey, was an American artist who worked primarily in the mediums of ceramic and metal sculpture.
Alexander Fisher, was an English silversmith and painter active in the Arts and Crafts movement in London. He was a teacher at the Slade School of Art and wrote a book about enameling and the article on "Enamel" for the Encyclopædia Britannica. His book, The art of enamelling upon metal: with a short appendix concerning miniature painting on enamel was published in 1909.
Otis William Oldfield was a San Francisco painter, printmaker and art educator.
Jamie Bennett is an American artist and educator known for his enamel jewelry. Over his forty-year career, Bennett has experimented with the centuries-old process of enameling, discovered new techniques of setting, and created new colors of enamel and a matte surfaces. This has led him to be referred to as “one of the most innovative and accomplished enamellers of our time” by Ursula Ilse-Neuman, historian and former curator at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. Bennett is closely associated with the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he studied himself as a student, and taught in the Metal department for many years. Bennett retired from teaching in 2014, after thirty years at SUNY New Paltz.
Karl Joseph Maria Drerup was a leading figure in the mid-twentieth-century American enamels field. Trained as a painter, Drerup taught himself to enamel in the early 1940s, fusing glass to metal through a high-temperature firing process. Through his inventive, "painterly" approach to the medium, he advanced enameling to new levels of beauty, power, and expressiveness. Drerup's love of nature is apparent in every detail of his intimate woodland scenes, just as his depictions of humble workers in natural settings reveal his profound respect for humanity. A modest, self-deprecating individual, he exerted an enormous impact on the generation of enamel artists that emerged in the United States in the period immediately following World War II.
John Parker Glick was an American ceramicist. Though open to artistic experimentation, Glick was most influenced by the styles and aesthetics of Asian pottery—an inspiration that shows in his use of decorative patterns and glaze choices. His experience working with ceramics led him to publish several articles about the craft. In addition to producing pottery, Glick began making "landscape oriented" wall panels during the latter part of his career. Known as "the people's potter," he is primarily remembered for his contributions to art and the field of ceramics.
Jacques Schnier (1898–1988) was a Romanian-born American artist, sculptor, author, educator, and engineer. He was a sculpture professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1936 to 1966.
Dominic L. Di Mare is an American artist and craftsperson, known for his weaving, abstract mixed-media sculpture, watercolor paintings, cast paper art, and fiber art. His work touches on themes of personal spirituality. He is based in Tiburon, California.
Gregory Kondos (1923-2021) was an American painter known for his landscapes, particularly those of California's Sacramento Valley and coastlines. Kondos’ close friend and frequent collaborator, artist Wayne Thiebaud, called Kondos’s intuitive, unfettered technique “a kind of brush dancing." Throughout his career, Kondos frequently painted Yosemite, serving as artist-in-residence at the national park in 1990. His large-scale paintings, River’s Edge (1988) and Sutter’s Gold (2015) decorate the Sacramento International Airport.
Frederick Carlton Ball (1911–1992) was an American multidisciplinary artist, author, and educator, who worked as a potter, painter, and jeweler. Ball was the first ceramicist to make large-scale thrown pots in California starting around 1935. He taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Mills College, Southern Illinois University, the University of Puget Sound, and the University of Wisconsin. He was elected to the American Craft Council College of Fellows in 1983
Terry Schoonhoven (1945-2001) was an American muralist, lithographer, and painter. Interested in the environment, architecture, film, history, geography, and the fluidity of time, he painted more than 40 large scale public murals over the course of his career, including six as co-founder of the LA Fine Arts Squad. His work -- "terrifying by the intensity of its reality and powerful associative qualities"—often explored dystopic environmental themes.
Anthony 'Tony' Natsoulas is an American sculptor and contemporary artist. Numerous galleries and museums such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Monterey Museum of Art,, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, and the San Jose Museum of Art have exhibited Tony Natsoulas' work in the past; there are several large-scale pieces in public spaces.
