WELCOME

Welcome to our brand new blog.  Hopefully we will be able to post our journey through the exciting world of pottery as we create functional, decorative and sculptural pottery, explore new techniques, meet new, interesting people, and reacquaint ourselves with old friends from the pottery world.  We intend to share these adventures with you via this blog through words and pictures.  We welcome your feedback and sharing of your pictures and ideas.  Think of this as a venue for information and idea exchange for potters everywhere.  The only rule we have is that politics, negativity toward others, profanity and slander will not be tolerated and will result in the guilty party being banned from posting on the site.  Other than those simple rules, enjoy!

Currently all my work is organic and is representative of destruction by the natural forces or the sea, wind and sand on the shells of animals that once inhabited them in their life in or near the sea.  All the work is done in stoneware and is glazed by brush as opposed to dipping.  I feel that I can better control where the particular glazes go on a piece as I use multiple glazes on one piece.  All my work is fired in an electric kiln using the slow cool process.

I love to experiment with glazes.  Using a glaze of a lower cone value and firing at cone 6 often produces some beautiful and interesting effects.  My only problem with this process is that I never seem to write down what glazes I use on a piece so that I can try to duplicate the finish on another piece in the future.  I only truly know on low fire glaze, an 04 Botz glaze, the outcome when it is fired to cone 6.

In school, I was totally bored producing the normal bowls, cups, platters, jugs, etc. that all pottery students are required to learn.  I vividly remember a Production Pottery class in which the instructor threw a cup and told us to produce 50 exactly like the one he had thrown; you know, same width, height, same shape, same handle, same, same, same, blah!  I threw the first cup to his specification and then proceeded to throw the remaining 49 in random shapes and sizes to break up the monotony.  Needless to say, the instructor was not very pleased with my assignment.

During the last year of school, we kept hearing about "finding your own voice".  I began to think that my pottery "voice" was mute.  One Saturday morning I was down in the home studio working with the clay, not truly paying attention to what I was doing.  I was daydreaming.  You know, off in another world totally detached from the cares and worries of real life.  My wife came downstairs and asked me what I was making.  Brought back suddenly to reality, I found that I had made 12 of these organic sculptural ceramic pieces without thought.  Believing as I do that clay will become what it wants to become if allowed, I saw the worn and destructed sea shells that I am so drawn to whenever I visit the sea.  My "voice" had finally spoken.

From that day until the present, I have paid homage to these forces through my body of work.  I get a great deal of pleasure from the pieces but I was concerned about the public acceptance.  To date, I have been highly pleased by the comments and sales.  Each person who has purchased a piece has told me what they see in the work and what meaning it has to them.  This is extremely fulfilling to me both as an artist but more importantly as a connecting human being.

I invite each of you to share on this blog because I will be bored just talking to myself.
Peace and Love