Eva Zeisel
Eva Zeisel
Eva Striker Zeiselwas a Hungarian-born American industrial designer known for her work with ceramics, primarily from the period after she migrated to the United States. Her forms are often abstractions of the natural world and human relationships. Work from throughout her prodigious career is included in important museum collections across the world. Zeisel declared herself a "maker of useful things"...
NationalityHungarian
ProfessionDesigner
Date of Birth13 November 1906
creativity mean opposites
If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas...
makers useful-things
I am a maker of useful things.
home men design
Men have no concept of how to design things for the home. Women should design the things they use.
curves vocabulary design
Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.
want novelty designer
I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.
use doe designer
The designer must understand that form does not follow function nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive solutions.
novelty aesthetic commerce
Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.
party artist people
My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.
order support pottery
If I hadn't been a designer, I'd have been a painter. I began as a painter and learned the craft of pottery in order to support myself.
be-kind shock grotesque
I never wanted to do something grotesque. I never wanted to shock. I wanted my audience to be happy, to be kind.
world made wanted
I made the things particularly because I wanted them to see the world.
looks finished ifs
When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.
hands woods clay
Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.
hands bird clay
When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.