Been there, smashed that

Krafft and the Slovenian artists and musicians traveled into Sarajevo in U.N. personnel carriers, arriving in the war-ravaged city the day the Dayton Accords were announced. In an e-mail message to a friend at the time he wrote, "The mise en scene of the totaled city certainly lent extra meaning to Laibach's spooky cover of 'Sympathy for the Devil.' You could smell the sulfurs of hell and the stench of death in the snow blowing through the ruins of block after block of shelled hotels, hospitals, homes and shops."

Krafft later returned to the region to begin work on his porcelain weapons, stopping along the way in Holland where he got a decidedly cold shoulder at the headquarters of a delftware manufacturer he visited in hope of learning techniques. As Krafft later recalled the episode: "It was as though I was asking for human organs or weapons-grade plutonium. It wasn't until a tattoo artist in Amsterdam's red-light district put me in touch with a friendly Hells Angel who had completed a rigorous apprenticeship program in a Delft souvenir factory in Gouda that I was finally initiated into the traditional Old World way of painting tulips on teacups."

Several years before the Porcelain War Museum came about, Krafft had been introduced to painting on porcelain by a group of now-beloved blue-haired ladies. As Krafft later wrote in an article for Studio Potter magazine, his "career in clay began in a suburban breakfast nook [in] ... the cozy clubhouse of a gang of sable-brush-wielding grannies who call themselves the Northwest China Painters Guild." He wanted to learn china painting, he said, "because I disliked clay and all the ... sanctimony that seemed to go hand-in-hand with studio potting. For me the whole scene smacked of Orientalism or therapy."

Krafft sat in on monthly classes led by a woman named Barbara Henderson. "It was all older women, grandmothers," says Krafft. "It was a kaffeeklatsch kind of thing. They'd talk about their grandchildren and their medical problems. I was the only man. I'd do one kind of china painting when I was with the ladies -- ships, windmills, boats on canals, little boys and girls wearing wooden clogs and carrying water buckets -- then I'd go home and make Disasterware."

Krafft's Disasterware is just what it sounds like: fine china decorated with pictures commemorating disasters -- the bombing of Dresden, the sinking of the Andrea Dorea, the explosion of the Hindenberg -- all painted in delftware blue. One Disasterware series, "Darkness in Delft," comprises oval, gold-rimmed plates with the upper half of the oval taken up by a bucolic country scene -- villagers ice skating, for example -- and the lower half illustrated with a gritty, noir image reminiscent of the photos in old magazines like True Detective.

When he started to show the work, the press took notice, and it's not hard to see why. The stuff is stunningly effective, wacky and unsettling. By appropriating a kitschy, drenched-in-tradition decorative technique and using it for his own wry reasons, Krafft takes the old, musty and inconsequential and turns it into trenchant commentary on human folly.

"I did this kind of interesting thing with an old prosaic design pattern," Krafft says. "I gave it a little spin. People are immediately struck by it. It surprises them, I guess. Why would someone depict disasters with floral patterns around it?"

Good question. "What did make you decide to commemorate disasters?" I ask.

"I remember doodling on a cocktail coaster that had a circle printed on it, and at the time the river up north of Seattle, the Skagit, was flooding and there was a lot of news about the floods," he says. "So, inside that circle I sketched a house sinking into a raging river. And I looked at it and thought, You know, that looks like it would make a good plate. Nobody does that kind of imagery on plates that really indicates the way we actually live now.

"My idea was to drag plate painting kicking and screaming into the 21st century with these images of things you don't usually find on tableware. It began as natural disasters -- like floods -- then it went into sociopolitical disasters where," he says, lowering his voice with mock gravity, "I've found the most comfort."

Before his porcelain work became internationally recognized, Krafft made precise, surrealist paintings, many of which were inspired, he says, by Nikola Tesla. At the same time he would occasionally make fishing lures -- from plastic crucifixes. He once rented a large truck, Sheetrocked the interior to transform it into a gallery, installed his paintings inside, along with a nicely dressed young woman to greet visitors -- an art stewardess -- then had it driven around Seattle (he doesn't drive, never has). On the side of the truck he hung a sign: "Metropolitan Mobile Museum -- Charles Krafft: The Happy Years, 1974-1994."

In a 1998 article, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's critic, Regina Hackett, who called Krafft "the dark angel of Seattle art," wrote, "What comes across in his art is an aggressive kind of ironic humor applied to various horrors. The deadpan nature of the aggression is what gives the horror a new kind of punch."

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