Clarice Cliff to decorate some of the old defective 'glost' (white) ware in her own freehand patterns. For these she used on-glaze enamel colours, which enabled a brighter palette than underglaze colours. She covered the imperfections in simple patterns of triangles, in a style that she called 'Bizarre'. The earliest examples had just a hand-painted mark, usually in a rust coloured paint, 'Bizarre by Clarice Cliff', sometimes with 'Newport Pottery' underneath. To the surprise of the company's senior salesman Ewart Oakes, when he took a car load to a major stockist, it was immediately popular. Clarice was joined by young painter Gladys
Clarice Assad left when Clarice was around 8, off to Paris seeking success on virgin but savvy turf, and putting on indefinite hiatus those cherished sessions together. Infrequent visits couldn’t reattach the torn ligatures, and Clarice abandoned music completely. “For so long,” she remembers, “I didn’t even touch the piano, or make any music at all because I connected it with him.” After a time, though, she began to play again. “I realized I was doing it for myself,” Clarice explains. The urge to continue her development was too great, the Assad legacy in her DNA. Clarice was born with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome,