Stray and Idle Notions

A guest post by David from Jive Time Records on Aaron Bohrod's mid-century pottery sketchbooks

cover for A Pottery Sketchbook (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967 edition)
out-of-print, but there are used copies floating around

From the inside flap:

An artist’s sketchbook is his storehouse of ideas. Into its pages he pours his dreams, his stray and idle notions, his useful and useless doodles, his plans for further explorations. The entire basic program in which his art is rooted may be found in his sketchbooks. Even when a series of sketchbooks, such as those which this book has been extracted, are intended for a special purpose, the sketch for the sketch’s sake has a way of taking over and calling fourth a seriously playful expression of hundreds of whimsical notions. Aaron Bohrod’s pottery sketchbooks are the lifeblood of his collaboration with the ceramic artist F. Carlton Ball, which began in 1950 when Mr. Ball taught on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. Over the years this collaboration has blossomed, producing a continuous exchange of ideas and mutual creation. The photographs of pottery interspersed among the sketches in A Pottery Sketchbook illustrate both the remarkable success of this collaboration and the exciting modification of shape and line which the three-dimensional clay form imposes upon the idea first executed on a two dimensional paper surface.

Artist’s bio via

Aaron Bohrod was born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 21, 1907. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York, eventually earning Guggenheim fellowships which permitted him to travel throughout the country, painting and recording the American scene. His early work won him widespread praise as an important social realist and regional painter and printmaker and his work was marketed through Associated American Artists in New York. During World War II, Bohrod worked as an artist, first in the Pacific for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, then in Europe for Life magazine. In 1948, he accepted a position as artist in residence, succeeding John Steuart Curry, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and remained in that capacity until 1973. Bohrod developed the Trompe-l'oeil style of highly decorative, detailed still life paintings which gives an illusion of real life. It was this style with which he became internationally identified. Bohrod died on April 3, 1992, at the age of 84.