Doriana Usai’s artistic magic

"Sleep on it" and the artists, before sleeping, reflect and daydream about their next creations. They spend the day realizing; but, they spend the night thinking and imagining what will be the next artistic work and what drawing will be represented. The art of pottery realized by Doriana Usai follows a particular daily path that makes each moment unique and magical.


As often it can happen, in a family core composed by artists, the children, too, begin having interest for that specific field and it becomes theirs, without no duties. The art is transmitted from a father to a child; but, if there is not passion, there is not the possibility of having excellent results.


There is a thin wire between passion and work. A job belonging to the artistic field cannot be considered a "parachute job". Although by now lots of individuals do specific jobs only for surviving, the art must be linked to love and an innate skill, not to a way for living, because if you cannot be able to realize a particular product, there is no sense for going on that road.


For Doriana Usai, a thirty five-year-old potter, the family and the framework where she grew up were two pillars of her life. Growing up and staying in contact with this world, you can make aware in various ways. Nobody obligated the young girl to carry on a specific professional path. Doriana felt herself free to choose to attend the school that she mainly likes.

Day by day, she fell in love with her father’s job and it became hers. Study and the practice directly on the field, during the summer, were enough for learning the art of pottery. «The artisan represents himself while he is working. On that he represents there is his whole sensitivity. There is a relationship and a feeling between the artist and the thing that is reproduced », Doriana tells.


Become an adult, studies did not finish; she attended the School of Pottery of Faenza and a course of restoration; currently, she attends the University of Literature and Design of Milano; she works as a potter in her workshop and in her shop, where she buys various things, among which some unique and inimitable clocks and where she often invites the schoolchildren for spending a whole day in contact with a world that is not known perfectly by current generations, that anyway learn to appreciate, seeing the products with their own eyes and learning the tricks of the trade; she works as a teacher in the professional schools, where she teaches the technique of pottery, through a course of a duration of two years for allowing then to have a qualification.


Doriana took part to numerous contests, beginning when she was seventeen years old. She won four times the World Championship, in the feminine section. She is often a judge and an internal commissioner during the exams of the races.


Generally, the time, that is indispensable from the idea to the wish of explaining the idea itself and, then, to the definitive realization, corresponds to one month around. Most of the requests by the customers are about bonbonnières, furniture accessories and things that the customers would like that are proposed again based on a draft that he himself gives to the potter. The works made by her remember above all the Sardinian Culture. Some kinds of products remember terracotta and Sardinian cakes.


She tries to keep the contact with tradition, trying anyway to create a compromise with innovation. The black-bellied plover is the recurring symbol of her things. Another important kind remembers gold and silver. A new technique experimented by the young potter is the fusion glass, because doing some attempts and some experiments is important for reaching great results.


Doriana Usai is a wife, a mother, an artist, a teacher and a student. She is a resolute and dynamic girl and she asks herself: «When someone presents my CV I think: Did I do all these things?».