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Claude Champy

Claude Champy

Curriculum Vitae

French nationality, born in 1944, works and lives in Plaisir (Fr).
Besides his own oeuvre, he collaborates with his partner - ceramist Nani Champy-Schott.
Both have long careers in working with clay while respecting each other's diversity.

Through his experiences with the Far East, Claude came to realise that ceramics can be "authoritative".  Practising ceramic art there is as much a means of expression as painting.

During his training, he was inspired by the oeuvre of the young artists in la Borne, firing in a wood-fired kiln and the rich and authentic lifestyle.
Already by the age of 31, he was a leading French ceramist and was invited to participate in conferences and exhibitions in several countries.
He won the Grand Prize of the Suntory Museum in Tokyo, exhibited in Japan, one of his fondest memories. This was formal recognition for him in a country where ceramics is an essential art form.

Claude Champy has a varied oeuvre that is sold to art collectors and in leading art galleries.
He has been a leading ceramicist at the world level (in Europe and Asia) for more than 40 years.

 

Inspiration

As he progressed in his career, he focuses on abstract wall panels and geological forms.
The larger works in particular often embrace landscapes and refer to craters and cliffs. 

In 1996, Claude Champy showed wall panels with a strong Japanese influence for the first time.

Claude works a lot with plates and glazes. Essential to him is obtaining beautiful simplicity through fine brush strokes, subtle decoration, quality glazes, a balanced palette of colours, a play of white and colour.
Little by little, a landscape takes shape whose true colours only become visible during firing. An imaginary painting takes shape.

Technique

Claude Champy has a deep understanding of the material and knows how to share this with us: as he works the clay, stretching, displacing and violating it, he allows the clay to catch its breath from time to time to give it a certain freedom. He sprinkles it with glaze in successive thick layers. He sprinkles his work with large coloured drops.

His glazes are reduced to a very limited range (black, white, copper red, celadon, ...), a range that can be exploited infinitely thanks to combinations and overlaps that are far from exhausting their potential.

Source : Claude Champy - Terre complice (Intimate clay) - Editions La Revue de la céramique et du verre (Sèvres - cité de la céramique)

Works of the artist