Németh János: Gyökerek. Gondolatok családról, mesterségről, művészetről (Zalaegerszeg, 2002)

Titles of the illustration in the text and the plates

The technique which he applied then for the first time, i.e. the use of forms assembled from wheeled elements (cones and cylinders), has been used in his works further on. After graduating, he returned to his birthplace because he was attracted by his family and the landscape of Zala county. In the 1960s he worked as a designer and instructor for the Tile Stove Manufacturing Company of Zalaegerszeg (today Zalakerámia Co) and he became a freelance artist he has been a freelance artist since 1969. Whenever it is possible he travels a lot and takes the cultural inheritance of other nations in with the greatest delight. Destinations of his travels are Italy, Sicily, Moscow, Vilnius, Romania, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, which are mentioned in his reminiscences. In his art he uses and develops the traditions of folk art and popular pottery in a peculiar way. At the beginning of his career he covered his platters, vessels and character figures with coloured covering glaze, then he made black pottery for a short time, whilst he covered his much liked pitchers and bottles with wonderful shades of the colours green and brown. Meanwhile, he gradually turned to the use of clay-glazed chamot, which he worked out experimentally on his wall works for the first time. The glaze, applied on to the base, grows rich with the marvellous shades of terracotta, siena, and umbra in the fire of the stove. Out of this the artist creates the mythological and scriptural scenes, the figures of the Hungarian legends, the sky and the natural beauties of the land of Zala, which are often represented, in the symbolically formulated figurai round plastics, platters, table and wall works. On other occasions, the wheeled forms change into full figured women, mythological creatures, human and animal shapes in his studio. The ceramic reliefs on buildings, the works made in the last decade and the monuments built in the years of the celebration of the millennium are all significant in the life-work of János Németh. His works have been exhibited in many European and Transatlantic countries, and a few of them belong to museums. More than half hundred of his public and mural works can be seen in Hungary and in many other countries around the world. One of his statues stands in the Hungarian Embassy of New Delhi and a wall work in Canberra (Australia). He is the member of the Association of Fine and Industrial Arts, the Art Foundation and the International Academy of Ceramics. He is owner of many honours and prizes. Among others, he received Munkácsy Prize in 1970, István Gádor Prize in 1996 and he became the honorary freeman of Zalaegerszeg in 1997. Illustrations in the Text: 1. The centre of Zalaegerszeg at the time of my birth, property of Göcsej Museum 2. My mother (right) and my aunt in Apponyi Street at the end of the 1930s 3. With a paternal good friend József Hart in front of the flower-beds, 1938, property of Göcsej Museum 4. In my mother's lap, 1937 5. My Kudich grandfather the "mounted mariner" around 1900 6. The Maria Teresa warship - photographed by Sze-Yuen Ming in Shanghai, 1902 7. My grandfather and his wife Teréz Szekeres with one of my great-grandmothers around 1900 (My Szekeres grandmother gave birth to 12 children, but only eight of them lived to full age) 154