Man Vs Machine: This mug is a vintage prototype decorated by my dad, Weston Neil Andersen, but it is also a prototype of the Andersen Design company philosophy of individualism. This mug pattern may evoke the calibrated order of geometry, but it is actually an intuitively executed orderly pattern that achieves a unity of field through the internal relationships of teardrops spontaneously responding to and resonating with each other. It is the individual relationships between the parts that create the holistic effect. This approach to decoration is counterintuitive to the standard practices of a mass production process and resonates across time and place, just as relevant in today’s public dialogue as it was in the midcentury, the Golden Age of the middle class, in which Andersen Design was established. The intuitive process depends upon faith that one good relationship begets another, rather than externally calculated coordination, and so it speaks of and through the inner soul of man. If all is well with the relationships between the parts, if together they form a lyrical tapestry, all is whole and complete.

This mug is unmistakenly created by Weston as a prototype pattern and so it is perfect in every way, except the chips along its inner and outer rim, an afterthought in time that delivers the wabi-sabi imperfection so elevated in fifteenth-century Japan. The teardrops may appear to have delicate outlines painted around their borders, but this too is an illusion. As a production piece such a process is too time-consuming. Each teardrop is created by laying the brush upon the form with fluid confidence. The artisan must be internally one with the quantity of decorating color in the brush to achieve such similarity in the appearance of the individual teardrops, Automation could not do it better because the similarity of the teardrops is yet another illusion, each one is actually unique in its own right.

Finally, to achieve this effect the artisan must understand the exact amount of flux in the glaze to allow the color to flow and blend within the teardrops without transgressing the gentle outlines around each one, and then the mug must be dipped in the glaze for just the right amount of time and the rise and fall of the kiln temperature must also be exactly right to achieve such a delicate and beguilingly simple pattern.

This mug is delicately cast and slightly oval in form so that the diameter of the lip is 2.08 inches and 2.75 inches. It is 3.5 inches tall and signed with a hand-scripted Andersen signature.

Vintage early 1950s