Lesley Anton Handmade Ceramic Lighting

There’s a long and venerable history in this country of individuals operating garage-based businesses capable of upheaving the prevailing order as the rhythms of daily life play out around them. Joining the pantheon of high-tech entrepreneurs and rock bands that have emerged from garages to make their mark on the world, is Lesley Anton, a Los Angeles ceramicist whose innovative vision and hand craftsmanship is enhancing the physical landscape of our homes.

The organic modern ceramic floor and table lamps she produces are impacting our interior spaces with the grace and vigor of sculpture and illuminating them not only with bulbs but also ray-bouncing glazes. The geometric forms, irregular surfaces, and naturalistic colors of Anton’s lamps enthrall with that much touted but hard-to-achieve visual hook—perfect imperfection. Ages-old glaze recipes for high-fired pots that hark back to Asia, lend her bases (some of which comprise six separate pieces) a rich glassy mien that was all but absent from the marketplace when she decided to launch her enterprise.

Aw

areness of that unoccupied niche was preceded by years of 2-D design school in Nebraska and work as a graphic designer in Dallas. It wasn’t until she moved to New York and left design work to become a flight attendant for American Airlines that her interest in ceramics took off. “I signed up for classes at the 92nd Street Y purely as a creative outlet and starting making wheel-thrown, functional wares,” Anton recalls.

“I had some fantastic teachers like Jeff Cox, Bruce Winn and Kathy King, and it wasn’t long before I became totally addicted. When I wasn’t flying, I was making ceramics. While throwing, your mind transcends the day-to-day and you completely separate from the world. There’s something deeply meditative and relaxing about that circular movement.”

After several years in New York, Anton and her husband (a stand-up comic and actor whom she had known in high school in Nebraska and who ended up living across the street from her in Manhattan) moved to Los Angeles where she joined a community ceramics studio and continued taking classes. “It took me five to seven years to get to the point of being able to control the clay instead of it controlling me,” Anton says. That hard-won mastery over her medium coincided with a chance meeting with a florist who commissioned tall vases from her to use for arrangements but, says Anton, “virtually disappeared when I tried contacting her to come and get them.”

Yet, with this small body of new work she had made the transition from making flat pieces to elongated vertical ones. And, with the encouragement of an interior designer friend, Joe Nye, and a budding insight into the interiors marketplace gained through his and her sister-in-law—Traci Anton’s connection to the interior design field, she began taking notice of ceramic lamps. “The retail shop and design studio for whom the two worked represented Christopher Spitzmiller’s ceramic lighting line and his high-end works along with those of Jonathan Adler and others, both present and historical, really caught my eye,” says Anton.

“I saw that no one was creating lamps for the trade with the sort of high-fired glazes I love—the glazes that lend a distinctive, one-of-a-kind character to a piece because of their unpredictable nature.”

Anton launched right into filling the gap by producing a small line of table lamps and marketing them herself by visiting shops with photographs of the samples. Her pieces were immediately picked up by Los Angeles retail shops Orange and Rubbish as well as by Downtown, her first to-the-trade account whose owners inspired her to add floor lamps to her output when, one day, they began stacking her table lamp forms together. Selling to the likes of Drew Barrymore and Laura Dern, she was off to a promising start.

Lighting designer Marian Jamieson, whom she bumped into in a lighting parts shop, assured continued expansion by recommending Anton to the to-the-trade showrooms that represented her own work; hearty endorsements by others followed suit. Today, Anton is represented by DeSousa Hughes, Ted Boerner, J.Batchelor, Industrial Storm, George Smith, Town, and Thomas Lavin and large-scale orders from the hospitality industry have begun pouring. But burgeoning demand not withstanding, Anton and her production manager, ceramic sculptor Audrey Roberts, still produce every piece themselves with the support of several L.A.-based artisans—a wood-turner, finisher, shade-maker, and slip caster. What does the future hold for Anton? “I’m looking to grow my hospitality orders and get molds made of all my pieces so I can increase production and get back to the creative studio work more,” she says.

Anton’s in her garage today, hand-glazing a piece that will make its way into one of her totemic floor lamps. The door of the garage studio lifts revealing an electric kiln alongside a crop of variously sized bicycles and surfboards telltale signs that this studio is part of an active household occupied by children as well as adults. Tables lined with lamp bases in various stages of completion, buckets of glaze, boxes of clay, and the potting wheel that is the epicenter of Anton’s creative universe broadcast the dynamic disorder characteristic of a business on the rise.

Splattered with color and streaked with clay, there could be little doubt as to the nature of Anton’s immediate pursuit even if she were not brandishing a brush. She speaks excitedly about the product at hand: “The floor lamps have a human-like scale to them because of the width of their bases. When you’re around one, you can easily feel as if you have someone in the room with you.”

Of course this ceramist, the mother of two eleven-year-old twin daughters, keeps the company of more than just lamps that resemble people. Bearing testimony to her bustling personal community, young female voices chatting about sleepovers mingle in the background with the high-speed tapping of text messages being sent back and forth and a phone that rings non-stop as the kids’ friends respond to the texts on the wrong number. The tenacious spirit that enables Anton to redo pieces over and over until they can stand up to her hyper-critical standards no doubt serves her well against the hubbub fueled by her kids, and today, by the airborne assaults of humongous ‘kamikaze’ Japanese beetles flying in and out of her studio.

There are not many vendors who apply the watchful eye that Anton does to safeguard excellence at every stage of her products’ creation while juggling the multitude of responsibilities of a stay-at-home Mom. “I think I’m the only vendor in any of my showrooms that manufactures their own work,“ she says.

“When someone is buying one of my products, it’s got my hands all over it—they all come from my heart.”

As her business expands, it may become impossible for Anton to continue concentrating with such intensity on each of its many dimensions. But whatever the scope of her future focus, the interior design field—and the legacy of the American garage—will no doubt be the richer for it.

ABOUT LESLEY ANTON

Ceramic artist and designer Lesley Anton gets her inspiration from many sources; the natural world, architecture, the human form, and machinery. Her lighting designs are a surprising and intriguing addition to any interior.

Anton’s bold, sculptural forms and lovely textural surfaces make a strong statement, yet they do not overpower. She tempers their exaggerated scale and silhouettes with quiet color palettes, in hues stolen from nature: snow, sky, mud, sand, algae. The high-fired clay finishes are made idiosyncratic with eucalyptus pods, lotus root slices, and other organic elements impressed into the clay that, she explains, “mess up” and sensualize what might otherwise be another hard-edged modern object.

Anton’s design approach might be termed “organic modern,” reaching back to the 1950’s, with a nod as well to Japanese minimalism. Her aesthetic plays on the serendipitous character of the high firing process where the beauty of the finished product is its intentional imperfection.

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VIEW THE LESLEY ANTON CATALOG ON DECORATI

Lesley Anton Products on Decorati
Lotus Table Lamp	Dotted Bottle Floor Lamp	Dune Table Lamp	Ribbed Floor Lamp
Sol Floor Lamp	Machine 3 Accent Lamp	Dotted Tube Floor Lamp	Sol Table Lamp