Pre-Show Photo

I set up the show today. (Click on the picture for a much larger view.) I have only a 6' space, which I tried to maximize with my show stands. If you can't build from side to side, you build upward.

I just need to make a little sign saying Mimi Stadler Pottery, to put on the small blank wood area in the middle-ish, and the table is done. There are more pots under the table in boxes to replenish the booth as (here's hoping) empty spaces appear. Now I'm ready to just have fun.

Come See the Show!

First of all, here’s the show I’ll be in on Sunday.

If the image is unclear, it's 12-5 on Sunday, May 6th, 2012, at Evalyn Dunn Gallery, 549 South Avenue West, Westfield, NJ.

 The invitation is misleading. I will only be there on Sunday, and the work will be at the gallery without me through May 11th. But while I’m there on Sunday, I hope 1) to have fun, and 2) sell some pottery!

 “Clay pots” is an un-descriptive term. What KIND of pottery? What will it do to enhance your life? Ah, these are questions that do have answers. You might want to chat with me at the show for the answers to these and other questions. Or you can ask me when you see me next.

This is a photo of part of my trial setup, which I do in my studio before each show to determine what work will fit in the allotted space:

 The new porcelain is REALLY nice. It throws beautifully on the wheel and is so easy to trim. Best of all, the clear glaze that crazes all over my usual stoneware, fits the porcelain like a smooth and glassy glove- no craze lines. This, in case you don’t get how great this is, is really, really great. Here’s a little number that has the clear on it, plus some soft and relatively unexciting green, but where the green goes over the clear and some nice blue ginkgo leaves go with it, oh my. I’m very happy about this! Too bad I don’t have any more of this lively motif to put in this show, but my next show is in November and I hope to have some then:

 Since nothing in my life is linear except the evident passage of time, I also have been watching pottery videos and looking at the work of contemporaries online, possibly when I should have been hard at work in the studio. But potter does not live by the wheel alone. The brain must be fed to keep the ideas going. I went to the Song Dynasty ceramics exhibit at the Morris Museum (NJ)and made a couple of quick sketches, which I refined afterward. Here is a sketch of a wonderful covered jar I saw:

(Qingbai is pronounced ching-pie, by the way.) It’s very cool to see beautiful pots from the 11th century, as lively looking as when they were made- because, except when it is broken, pottery lasts and lasts and lasts. The leaves are lotus, and although you can’t tell from my drawing, they are carved in two levels, with one layer of leaves appearing to lie over the other. I’m planning to make some pretty jars like this one- my carving senses are tingling.

 I also drew this small bottle with its flat rim, storage for wine maybe.

("Jun" is pronounced Chun.)

I had seen other pieces in the exhibit with two parts, let’s say a cup sitting on a water pot, so I thought of mayim acharonim and drew the transitional idea that stemmed from the Jun bottle. I changed the curve and size of the rim, and added a little cup that plugs into the mouth of the bottle like a stopper. Probably I will change the shape of the little cup so that it has a bit of neck instead of being so round, but we shall see once I start fooling with the prototype.

 Feel free to visit my website soon. I have someone looking it over again for holes and danger spots (remember the hack job?) but will update it before long.

"Orphans & Oddments" to the Rescue!

We had dishes for 6 (which is how many we are this year) for Passover dairy meals, but 2 more guests arriving for lunch. To the kiln room! The Orphans & Oddments section! Two plates that didn't match anything else...to the rescue.

Lots of salads, and not enough bowls- same meal- back to the kiln room for two bowls. Here are two tureens, one red with blue interior and one pale green, both orphans because their lids met with accident... presto. Salad bowls.

They are with the dairy dishes here, as are two pots which came upstairs way back: the mug with the slight fissure above the handle, and the oval fish platter with the slightly rough glaze I made back in the '90s.

But we are having coffee! And there is no milk pitcher! Another trot downstairs, back to Orphans & Oddments, to the funky little creamer that didn't match anything else and has been ignored, gathering dust for quite a long time.

And the washing cup we used before got chipped, so last year I brought up this blue one from the kiln room. It has a thin spot on the glaze inside and had been put on the seconds shelf...

My very own little Shop of Oddments. So handy.

Balancing Materials, Process and Gallery

Found a rubber band in my sweatshirt pocket. I must've been cooking when I put it there. It is a fat purple band with Produce printed all over it.

When I was small, I loved rubber bands. I made weird-bounce balls out of them. They came in handy for all sort of things. You could shoot paper wads with them. You could keep together your favorite pencils. Before coated hair elastics, you could use one to make your pony tail. (Ouch.) Truth. I couldn't resist a good rubber band.

I saved buttons, too, for their colors and textures. Anything that could be used to draw with, I saved: chalk, burnt charcoal ends of sticks, pencils, pens, markers. The sharp end of a little hard stick could be dipped into a squished mulberry (we had some trees) for ink. Anything was fair game and it was all interesting material, particularly on a long summer day.

Material. Ah, this is a good place to be inspired. The natural world and also the man-made world are full of material. While my work is organic in sensibility, I like the visual appeal of bridges and oil derricks, concrete barriers and metal lattice, oil drums and crossbeams. And if you walk with me, you will know I also can't help the tactile materials: I pick up leaves, smell blossoms, trace the shapes of petals with my fingers, pick up colorful or shapely pebbles and closely examine the texture of bits of bark. Sometimes I've been known to hug a tree because it's so damn beautiful and because it is so smooth or so rough. I still (as in childhood) keep bits of flotsam here and there (a box of frosted smooth chips of beach glass!) though mostly I toss these things away, after perhaps storing the sense of them somehow in my head.

Material is also where clutter comes from. Texture bits: cloth, lace, corrugated pieces of cardboard, onion bag mesh. Fresh leaves, and leaf skeletons. Dried sheets of corn husk, grid patterned packing material, peach pits and grooved cedar sachet balls, all can be rolled or pressed into clay. What is clutter? If you watch Hoarders, a reality show to 'scare straight' the collector in all of us, clutter is that situation that overwhelms, that takes over, that represents blind madness. But mine is not just potential texture, but actual and often used. If you open a couple of plastic totes and bins on my studio shelves, potential clutter has been pared way down into the truly usable, and turned into organized and happily accessible textural treasure. (Except for that four-drawer bin of variously sized frame corner samples, from the framer that went out of business...what can I do with those..? Hmm.)

Creativity and the material that furthers it need balance.

It is good now and then to reorganize, or, in my case soon, renovate.

One of the renovation plans (so far on paper) is to build a wall between my workspace and my soon-to-be-rebuilt gallery space. In this dividing wall, I will put a pair of French doors, which have glass panes that gallery visitors can look through into the studio. They'll be able to see my potter's wheel, slab rolling table, tools and texture items, pottery in progress, and a small class workshop space. When people can make some sense of How & Where the Pottery Is Made, their experience looking at the art is naturally enhanced. There may be some people as interested as I am in the balancing act that is materials + raw process + fired process, all the integration of parts that lead to the finished object displayed in the gallery.

Another use of a found rubber band: Stretching the imagination.

Porcelain: thrown vs. rolled

No, I'm not committing violence upon my pottery as I make it. I'm examining the behavior of a new clay as it goes through my two basic forming processes.

Standard Porcelain 551, a new venture in fine white clay, threw well on the wheel, and trimmed well (that's where you use tools to refine the forms after they have been thrown on the wheel and firmed up). Goblets in various stages of trim:

But slab work (rolled between canvas sheets, textured and draped into a form) cracked as it dried. It does not want to be bent and manipulated. It probably wants to be covered and dried verrrry sloooowly. I didn't treat it to the right tender care, apparently, and it misbehaved afterward as it dried.

Well, this project is experimental just now, so anything could have happened. Different clays behave differently. Porcelain has a very fine particle size and this one has a large shrinkage rate. I lost all three of my sample projects, two 17" long by 12.5" wide platters and one square, textured bowl. The bowl, which I handled more in the raw, flexible state, cracked in four places. Here's a platter, in the process of objecting to my handling. It has two cracks forming, one at the top and one at the bottom. They will be much larger before they are done spreading:

The cracks from this one are mostly from settling under its own weight as it dried unevenly. You can see that the middle is damper (darker) than the edges. In short, it has poor standup when it's taken from the form it's draped into before it has dried completely. It can't support itself unless it's dried slowly and evenly. I can try that next, but I won't spend too much time on it. I prefer a clay for slab work that doesn't need so much pampering. It might only be worth the extra effort if glazes show up very beautifully on it. Even then, a high rate of loss of product isn't very good business.

At least I know I can throw with Porcelain 551, and I like it! It responded very well to the wheel process and felt mighty nice and non-gritty in my hands. The thrown forms seemed to survive much better. I am going to dry them slowly, and see if they want to crack too! Hope not. More tests to follow after Passover.

Hey- if you haven't joined this site as a Follower, feel free! Thanks!

A Visit to the Mingei Museum, San Diego

Mingei is the Japanese concept-word for art made by hand by ordinary people. As a formal movement, Mingei is only about 50 years old. But it is retroactive. It gives a name to works both ancient and recent, work that fits into this idea.

If you go to the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, you will find art made by hand and art not made by hand, a few pieces by people whose names were never recorded and more by people who are known. It is all supposed to be Mingei.

When I learned about Mingei, as a ceramics student in college, I learned that earlier Mingei potters tended not to sign their work. They regarded themselves and their pottery as part of the art of life, above ego. Their pots were their signatures. Ego eventually wins out most of the time, though, and contemporary potters usually sign their work. I do.

At the museum (all photos are from the museum's beautiful website): Jean Balmer’s garden forms.

Forms? These are like big hollow pebbles with holes in the top. Could in theory catch a little rain for a critter with a long thin nose or beak to drink from. Could certainly catch your eyes and take them around and around the shapes. Real function? Visual interest. Environment enhancement. Could a “regular” potter make these? Yes.

Jack Rogers Hopkins’s Mirror Chairs

I wanted to sit in these. They were so curvaceous and sinuous. Function? Certainly. Unusual, but functional. Form? Wowee. Could a regular chair maker make something like these? If one dreamed of this form, or copied Hopkins’s, one could.

Tim Crowder’s Chair:

A rocker made of leather and wood, this had a medieval sort of feeling. Unusual? Yes. Functional? Yes. Repeatable if someone took it into his head to do so? Yes.

Being in a museum, these were not touchable, only viewable. But. Want. To. Touch. (If I may point out the obvious, potters are into the tactile.) And in my own way, that is my definition of Mingei: Can Be Touched. Yes, if we are to see examples of beautiful, usually functional objects made by hand by art-inclined ordinary folks, we have to save some of these things in a collection and metaphorically rope them off. But this roping off always makes me feel subversively inclined. However, law abidement prevailing, I did not touch. Instead, I made a note and decided to sort of touch them with my thoughts later.

A smaller part of the museum is devoted to mass-produced wares, also designed to function well and be attractive or interesting at the same time. I won't agree that machine made objects can be as imbued with individuality as handmade; it is antithetical. But I guess they can be Mingei if you stretch the term a little to mean well designed objects that function artfully. There's where "Mingei" becomes a bit too fuzzy an idea.

But still. Taking "Mingei" to mean art for the people by the people that's also reproducible, machine reproduction has to be figured into the idea. In the gift shop, a set of cast teabowls caught my eye. Four smallish, handleless cups, each glazed in a different color for variety, these were packaged in an elongated rectangular box with a perfectly sized section for each teabowl. The box was part of the presentation. Against my aesthetic will (call it kickwheel potter's snobbery), I found these manufactured cups very appealing, and the whole package satisfying arranged. In Japan, master potters traditionally sold (and still sell) their best pots packaged in individual, handmade wooden boxes, made to order for each size and shape. Mass manufacturers still consider the box as part of the presentation of an object.

Plenty for a potter to think about, after a subversive "touching trip" through the museum in my head.

Necessary Serendipity, or an Un-Chance Encounter

When my gym closed for good locally, I found another one I liked about 20 minutes’ drive from home. Many friends from the old gym relocated there, but there were also plenty of faces new to me. One of them seemed kind of familiar. It was only when I heard her speak that her Midwest accent jogged my memory hard, and I remembered.

I think I was supposed to meet Patricia again. She was a terrific teacher. I took one 10-week course with her. I was at a temporary stopping point in my clay career. Call it potter's block. But much has happened since I studied drawing in her class at the Visual Arts Center. In the 9 years since then, I went back to work in the studio, and grew quite a lot as a potter. My work made the transition to professional. My website became reality. I am only lacking some marketing know-how to make my cottage industry into a better business.

Patricia is a passionate artist. She has lots to say, both with spoken words and with materials like paper, metal, wood, charcoal, paint, ink and more. When she taught, she rarely stopped talking, teaching every moment as her students drew. She is as focused as a laser. It is Patricia’s passion for her art that struck me afresh as I stood in the new gym chatting with her.

We gave one another our business cards, the ones with our website URL’s.

Patricia began telling me that her work is now in museums, galleries, private collections, and public outdoor installations. It is traveling around the United States, with its theme of endangered regional birds.

I've been selling nice pieces here and there, enough to keep me motivated. But I haven't been, shall we say, buying steak on my earnings.

She launched into advice about finding your target audience and focusing on bringing your work to it however you can. She doesn’t make art that goes over somebody’s couch, she said. She has to find and bring her work to serious art collectors.

I made as if to snatch my card back from Patricia, because I really have my work cut out for me at the moment, learning how to improve my marketing skills. But the card-grab was pretend. I was glad to send her to my site. I welcome her genuine interest in clay and the techniques of pottery-making, and something further: what is art when we talk about clay? I know I will have lots to talk about and plenty to learn from Patricia. There may be some thoughts I can offer her in return. She was, in fact, excited to run into a fellow artist. I was excited to re-meet an artist I once knew, one with great drive, who has thought hard and worked hard to find a niche in the art world.

Recently, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. This is a book about what makes one person succeed while another does not, though they might have equal abilities. He writes about times, places, special opportunities and birth dates, and how they play a part in a person’s success or lack of it. He posits that having the right factors in place gives even a less qualified person an edge over a technically better-qualified one.

I read Patricia’s bio on her website today and pondered whether the premise of Outliers applies. I made inevitable comparisons. Patricia was encouraged at home to choose art above other professions. I was actively discouraged. (Artists cut off their ears, I was told.) Patricia traveled with her parents around the country and parts of Europe in her youth. I stayed in our little neighborhood and played in the woods near our house, a small world, though admittedly interesting. She was an only child, with choices made possible by an economic and educational boost. I was one of many children, with extremely few economic advantages and less than optimal cultural access. Patricia read extensively, with parental advice and encouragement. I read whatever I could get my hands on, whenever there was space and quiet (limited commodities then).

I focused on positives as I mused about Patricia’s path and mine.

This is my conclusion: in the absence of money or culturally rich education, I did not flourish in my profession till quite late. I read, took courses, learned my craft, and began putting my own personality into what I created. I began to recognize that my situation had changed. There's moral support from friends and siblings, who have seen me grow and concluded that I really mean it, and who want me to make great pots, and sell them. My husband and kids want that, too. Friends are willing to listen to me when I think over what to do next, and I've got associates in the clay world to mull technical and artistic subjects over with. I’ve learned to ignore those snobs who sneer at the “little woman painting pots,” who are totally clueless about what I do. (They had a fun time at a paint-your-own place once.) And last week, I had the fine fortune to bump into Patricia, and to start some good straight talk about the business of art.