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...