About The Artist
Florentina Looper is an American artist specializing in slab-built porcelain adorned with highly-detailed illustrations and paintings. Trained as a traditional canvas painter, her finished pieces are essentially original paintings on fine porcelain. All pieces are functional art and meant to be used daily in the home.
"I'd like my art to be elegant, strange, and breathtakingly beautiful to its beholder. An heirloom whose magic lasts past my generation. My aesthetic is heavily influenced by the great 19th century Impressionists, 19th century Western literature illustration, Medieval mysticism and iconography, and Pre-Raphaelite and Art Nouveau figuratism. Like many others, I see beauty in classic depictions of goddesses and nymphs, in the symmetry and vitality of young flowers and animals, but I like to present these things with intentional imperfection, asymmetry, and a hint of deterioration. My own personal ode to entropy."
The Process
Playfully fanciful and feminine, each porcelain piece is one-of-a-kind and created with meticulous attention to detail.
GREENWARE: Each ware is shaped by hand from soft porcelain using a combination of slab-building and pinch methods before being allowed to slow-dry for 5-10 days.
BISQUE & PAINTING: Once fully dried, wares are kiln-fired to half their full temperature, hardening them for drawing and painting. Illustrations are sketched directly onto bisque, and then painted with underglaze pigments.
KILN-FIRING: Painted wares are kiln-fired to cone 6, transforming the porcelain into it's fully-vitrified (non-porous and maximum hardness) state and underglaze into a glass-shiny covering that is 100% food-safe.
GOLD DETAILING: 22k gold luster is painted on the fired wares and kiln-fired once more. The high temperature burns off all luster substances except the metal, leaving behind 100% 22k gold. Gold adorned wares are 100% food-safe.