PROCESS

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   Recently a prospective customer asked me if I would make her a tea bowl just like my large decorative bowls with the added thrown feet. I replied that I would love to, but added that it would be quite a bit of work since it takes time to add detailed handles, draw, incise and paint
 my landscapes on both sides. I gave her a price. I told her I would make two of them - she could choose her favorite - and she agreed that was fair.
   So these photos are a  partial progression of the process. Over a period of a couple weeks, I sent her a pictorial series of where the two cups were in their journey. After they were glazed, fired and removed from the kiln I emailed her photos so she could choose one; and so she did - but that was the end of our correspondence. Maybe it was the economy that doomed my sale; maybe there were other reasons. However, I was quite glad I had made them; thinking that they were both very successful pieces that just haven't found their home yet.
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Update- Feb 13, 2011- sold in the Tamarack Gallery during an opening show

New Work

These are a few things from the last firing- in September. I had some pretty spectacular results this time, due to trying to get the bottom of the kiln evened up in temperature with the top- which was hotter. So I ended up with several lost mugs due to the dreaded "meltdown syndrome", as potters sometimes say. Take the bad with the good, as usual.
http://www.gr8clay.etsy.com

Great Books

I've been buying books at antique shops, flea markets, auctions and even at bookstores my entire life- and have decided to let others share them. So--I'm also listing (slowly) my lifetime collection of vintage books. Some of them are quite rare, with many first editions, and I have a book to please about anyone- please check them out:
http://gr8books.etsy.com
including: westerns, sci-fi, children's, art, mystery, boy scout handbooks, philosophy, cooking, etc...

My influences...

Noticing a small landscape framed within one of my larger porcelain pieces, a customer recently asked me what kind of influences I had in my pottery... I answered that there is quite a long list overall, but that the particular vase he referred to was actually an environmental statement veiled behind the play and dance of the reaction of metallic oxides in glazes with each other within the fire... These results are somewhat controlled but total success depends on chance... I am heavily influenced by early Asian pottery, particularly Sung dynasty work; and I appreciate the American arts & craft movement and the European studio art potters of the past century as well... Since becoming an artist-in-residence at Tamarack: The Best Of West Virginia, I have found new influences, such as the incredible mountains and streams in the area... Music is also a constant part of my creative process... As a self-confessed news junkie, political statements find their way into my work, as well, mixed with elements of building structures of the past, present, and future... http://www.tamarackwv.com

My work...

My clayworks have evolved over the last few years, although possibly in subtle ways... I still explore the way glaze reacts with the porcelain and with other glazes and oxide enhanced slips... All of my work is true high-fired porcelain (approximately 2390 F)... I fire in a natural-gas forced-air burner reduction kiln... Porcelain is truly a great clay... The translucency of very thin wheel thrown and slab constructed porcelain is a tool I use with lighting fixtures, window tiles and cups... My engineering background, archaeology interests, and even the current political scene may all meld into one of my brushed and incised landscapes which have grown to be a metaphor on human relationships, and may be disguised within the details...

The beauty of porcelain...

Porcelain can be imagined as a combination of clay and glass, with the strength of glass but the pliability of clay... It is made of clays that are whiter and more pure than stoneware clays, free of iron, titanium and other impurities that give stoneware clays their various colors and rougher textures... These impurities also interfere with the tightly interlocking crystals that grow as the substance is heated then cooled... Thus, porcelain forms a tighter, denser and more crystalline structure... This allows the passage of light where it is thin, although not all porcelain clay bodies have translucent qualities... Since the particles are much smaller, porcelain is much less forgiving and takes time to master on the wheel...