Roger Michell

Roger Michell (1947 – 2018) was a British studio potter, artist, illustrator, poet and writer. He was most known for designing Walking Ware, a tea set on legs with over-sized Mary Jane shoes. During the nineteen seventies and eighties, thousands of these tea sets were sold, either hand made from Lustre Pottery studio or manufactured by Carltonware in Stoke-on-Trent.

Life

Early career Michell was born in Guildford, Surrey, the youngest son of Edna Wilkinson née Scott, a school teacher, and Howard Norman Tobias Michell, referred to as Norman, a modernist architect and garden designer. He attended Harrow High School until he was 15 when he was apprenticed to David Eeles in Dorset. He stayed with them as part of the family. Here Michell developed his throwing skills and observed first hand the building of a brick kiln.

He was accepted into a foundation course at the Central School of Art and Design in 1963 at the age of 16. He studied his degree under Gilbert Harding-Greene but left the degree a year early in 1965, to set up his own pottery in London making tableware. Anthony Caro was Michell's landlord in St John's Wood and his massive studio was behind the pottery, so when Michell's business folded in 1966, Caro offered him a job. He spent the next year painting Caro's sculptures which were 3D representations of paintings or music. A year later he went to the Serpentine Gallery as a gallery assistant.

Lustre pottery and the Walking Ware tea set In 1970, Michell met and subsequently married Danka Napiorkowska, a fellow student. They moved to Yorkshire to establish a pottery in East Knapton. The work produced reflected a shared admiration of 18th century creamware and some ambitious designs were produced influencing the look and feel of 1970s pottery. A plethora of novel designs began to gain prominence in the high street, for example a liquorice allsorts handbag and novelty teapots.

Lustre Pottery was officially established 12 April 1972.

Michell moved to Cornwall with his family, where he set up a one-man studio while his wife concentrated on her painting. They divorced in 1988. His second marriage, to children's author Jill Murphy, also ended in divorce.

In 2001, Michell was commissioned by Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to become Artist in Residence for a new Bodmin Hospital, He commissioned various local artists, including his former wife Napiorkowska, and designed and made the blue glazed brick wall bearing the hospital's name. In 2001, Michell decorated a hydrotherapy pool at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, with poet Mike Hughes. Michell illustrated Hughes' poetry on white, manufactured tiles. These formed a tiled mural which depicted various Bristolian scenes, among others, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Michell went on to commission art for 2 more hospitals.

Michell married Julia on 24 December 2002, and they moved to France in 2003. In France he was able to spend more time developing his ideas and revisiting old ones such as the fashion models he and Sally Tuffin had collaborated on in 1985. He installed a gas kiln. In 2005, he design 2 more limited edition Walking Ware teasets using porcelain rather than earthenware. Here he found time to develop his personal work whilst also making teapots for collectors.

Last years and exhibiting works Michell held his last exhibition of pots and paintings in England in 2013. Paintings in oil included several series, one of the French countryside surrounding the studio where he lived and worked, another a series of studies concerning the alteration of colour according to the light conditions, painted whilst staying on Le Point de Raz, the most Westerly point in Brittany. A year before he died he finished a long series of oil paintings of his wife Julia. thumb

He wrote and published a mystery novel, The Salt Glaze Murders Glasgow City Museum, the Norwich Castle Museum, the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Staffordshire, and the Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum in London.

He died unexpectedly on the night of 11 April 2018, after a short illness.