On the studio wall surrounding us hung brightly colored drawings on paper. The tools of the potter--a wheel, tables, brushes and glazes—were set around the room’s periphery. Woodman’s kiln was out of view, but I could faintly hear the white noise it produces. There were also new works being thought out, brightly colored paper carpets of fuchsia and yellow or blue and black, and works in black and white with repeated linear patterns of three parallel lines lay on the floor. Large vases, bent and twisted, stood in the middle of the room and beckoned with a kind of sensual physical richness. Her studio is a complete world that encompasses the colors you sit on, the ones you look at flat on the wall, and the vases provocatively invading the space.

Betty began as a functional potter, a maker of small vases and pots that owed much to ancient pottery. Except that these were no ordinary vases: they were not only formally inventive but also she applied the glazes the way a painter applies oil; the touch, the dip, the hue were all exquisite. Her work reflects her sensibility: at once playful and in-your-face. She is deeply invested in color relationships and the intensity of the hue. Ultimately, it is these glazes and their counter play with the geometric shapes of the vases that draw me into the work. Over time, her work grew larger and became more painterly and sculptural.  She continued making vases but the handles became more architectural and wing-like: she threw them flat on the wheel, then them cut into geometric shapes before attaching them to the vases.

These wings are crucial to Betty’s work. Because of their distinctive geometry, they function more as extensions of the vessel than handles with which to carry it. Betty takes generous liberties with glazing: the three-dimensional pot becomes a support for the spirited movement of color, which takes on a life of its own rather than functioning as decoration. By drawing additional vases on the surface of her ceramics, she creates a play between two- and three-dimensionality that recalls Cubist space. In some cases, the glazing creates very different images with very different relationships to the shape of the vase on different sides, giving three-dimensional objects a defined front and back.

Betty also goes further by removing the wings from the vessels and attaching them to the walls behind them as untethered, freeform shapes. This approach is similar to the one the artist Howard Hogdkin uses in his abstract paintings, where the painting exceeds the limits of the canvas and moves onto the frame and thus into the viewer’s space. Her large painted walls are not autonomous paintings but environments against which the vases are to be seen. She thus transforms the ceramic vase from sculptural object to shallow relief to installations in which she deals with entire space of the gallery or room. She overlooks no detail in the way she presents her work: when she had her show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Betty replaced the vases holding the ever-present flowers that fill the atrium with her own.

Betty is a woman of power. She is physically strong from a lifetime of manipulating clay. Growing up during the Depression (she was born in 1930) must have made her want to make things that people could use. But her desire to make art rather than functional objects took over. She projects a strongly defined persona. Her outfit is youthful and funky; she wears big glasses made of small bits in multiple colors, knee socks and sneakers, and a patterned dress with a vest for warmth on top. Her outfit, like her work, is full of wit but rooted in functionality. Betty talked to me about what people wear: she told me that this year, the people she sees on the subway all have winter hats with a braid on each side, while artists continue to wear the all-black uniform (I am guilty of this). She concludes that most people are followers, but she is not. It's true: she is not a follower but a player.

Betty tells me about a post-war building in Italy in a small town whose architecture was so impossibly ugly that the mayor convinced her to design a new façade to be painted on the side of the building to disguise it. I love the way this project participates in the tradition of painted buildings in Italy with their wonderful ochre and green stuccos. But this painting creates the illusion of giant red Cubist vases on a wall. An architectural mess is now reinvented as an art object by Betty’s intervention. This building so impressed the mayor of the town where the Woodmans live in Tuscany that he wanted her to paint a building there as well. Even though one can tell she was fascinated by the prospect, Betty put the proposal aside: she makes her own decisions of where and when she will create her work.