“You’ve got to give yourself the opportunity to know clay. It is a demanding master and submissive mistress.”

His is a lifetime of working in clay that started in 1959 and continues to this day.

If the baseline criteria for becoming a master is having logged ten thousand dedicated hours in the practice of the craft, then no question Stan Bitters is one.

He is an American ceramic sculptor rooted in the abstract expressionism which Peter Voulkos understood as a modality suited for American ceramic art. It is one which Stan would continually push against, embrace, question, pick apart, pick up, and smash to the ground.

And he would do all that in his studio.