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| A mosaic planter seen in the front garden of a home in Deruta, Italy. |
"Your products were beautiful and so perfect that they did not look to be handpainted" wrote Mr. Robert P. from Middletown, MD about Cama Deruta handpainted pieces. Nowadays the fact of ceramics being as perfect as transferwares seems to be quite a compliment.
Perfection in Deruta handpainted ceramics is part of the recent history of the past twenty/thirty years, when Deruta ceramics were in the best retail stores in the United States at expensive prices and in large quantities.
I remember when I was at Biordi's in San Francisco as a resident expert in the early 1990s and more recently in 2006, a customer from New York sent back a beautiful Ricco Deruta rectangular tray because of a tiny little hole on the surface of the glazing. We sent another one back as a replacement without any comments. In Italian there is a saying "Customers are always right" ("Il cliente ha sempre ragione").
When you reach such a perfection as part of the demand of the market, you crash defective pieces into mosaics or you sell these pieces at lower prices to friends or to returning customers at the workshop, making sure that the irregular pieces will not be subject to requests of exchange. In retail stores in the United States you may find sometimes corners of ceramic pieces with the "as is" sign.
I remember a customer visiting Cama and looking for pieces to be adopted, horphans. How sweet of her! The customer looked at the irregular pieces with lots of love and interest. Indeed in defective pieces there is the same amount of work, of love and of passion and some sort of uniqueness. Most of the time there is even more work, because the piece goes through at least one touch up and refiring. Additionally when refiring oval platters, wall plates or cake plates for instance the chance of losing the pieces is very high. The pieces are likely to crack or split in half.
The striving for perfection made us into such perfectionists at Cama Deruta that sometimes it was difficult even for us to spot the defects. To the United States we sent out only flawless pieces and in flawless cardboards. A lot of work and great satisfaction.
In the world of high-end quality porcelains (ceramics made of kaolin such as by Richard Ginori in Italy or the more famous German porcelains) the rule is that irregular pieces will not enter the market and will be destroyed without any attempt to recover them, which makes the cost of porcelains raise considerably.
Hopefully resuming work soon, I miss the work of Cama, it has such a distinctive personality, I would recognize it everywhere, I love it so much!
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FRIENDS OF CAMA
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