Bentley Le Baron—potter

An Enchanted World of Clay

Master potter Bentley Le Baron has spent 40 years creating his own ceramic world—a place of beauty and magic, inhabited by creatures both real and mythical: gods and goddesses, ravens and owls, bears and bulls, cats and dogs, and, perhaps most popular of all, dragons. These stand alongside functional tableware and painting as his main artistic legacy.

With Bentley’s retirement in 2023, his studio transformed into a gallery stocked with his remaining works, mostly sculptural pieces. Visitors can find further examples of Bentley’s fanciful creatures in the surrounding woods—a playful Pan, a soulful goddess, and more.

Bentley started out not as an artist but rather as a philosophy professor. “I was pushing 30 when I first touched clay,” he says. He did his doctorate in politics and philosophy in London, England, and then taught in Ontario for six years.

All that time, he was hanging out with artist friends and regularly visiting the art department,  thinking, ‘I’d like to do that too.’ He began learning pottery as a sideline to academia. By the time he moved to Denman Island in 1979, he was ready to devote himself fully to art.

“I just hung out a shingle as a guy who made functional dinnerware,” he says. Soon he was getting commissions for dinner sets. He then branched into hand-built sculpting, and that too proved popular. Over the decades he’s exhibited throughout BC and in numerous places in Ontario.

Bentley’s themes evolved out of the ceramics process. “The kiln always seemed like the Great Mother Dragon, the Transformer, and so just hanging out with the kiln got me interested in mythology. The elementals—earth, air, fire, water—got me interested in those themes. Then I started finding imagery from mythology around the world—the sun and the moon, the dragon, and animal creatures that had been sacred to early peoples in different parts of the world,” he says.

Contact info: 250-335-0198 | dannicrenna07@gmail.com

See Bentley’s work on Denman: at his studio, by appointment; at the Denman Craft Shop. By fall, 2025, two of his sculptures will be installed in the sculpture garden beside the Denman Island Arts Centre.