Paul Soldner

Paul Soldner, an American ceramic artist, was a student and contemporary of Peter Voulkos. An innovator and avid explorer of new pottery techniques, he is popularly known as the Father of American Raku.

Soldner was a teacher who focused in a from-scratch approach to teaching, emphasizing a basic understanding of clay, as well as glaze chemistry and kiln-building. He was responsible for inventing a type of low-temperature salt-firing and went so far as to found his own ceramic equipment manufacturing company to produce and sell his inventions.

While he produced a significant amount of functional-ware, he was well known in the ceramic abstract expressionist movement and produced a number of works consisting of conglomerations of wheel-thrown pieces, that were attached to one another in abstracted organic constructions.