A busy and wet weekend in Falmouth

It's near midnight Tuesday and I'm more or less recovered from a long weekend of pottery events and a wet and windy northeaster. The gallery is back together again and pots are cooling in the bisque kiln.
First, Friday evening the Woods Hole Historical Museum 0pened its "The Art & Nature of Workmanship: Six Woods Hole Potters, " with a lovely and well-attended reception. Potters Anne Halpin, Ron Geering, Joan Lederman, Ann Newbury, Tessa Morgan and myself are showing together through the summer in a room in the museum. The show was organized and mounted very nicely by Anne Halpin. It looks great and drew a big (for Woods Hole) crowd on what turned out to be a lovely Friday evening.
What makes me a "Woods Hole potter"? Even though Hatchville Pottery is nearly a half-hour from Woods Hole, I'm told that because I drink coffee at the Woods Hole Coffee Obsession on a weekly basis, and because I hold a Woods Hole Library card, I qualify. Works for me ... though the others all have better geographic claim on the title.
Then about dawn Saturday morning I drove with a loaded truck to downtown Falmouth to set up for the two-day Arts Alive event, now in (I think) it's fourth year of showing off local artistic talent of all kinds. This year the selling craftspeople were set up off the library lawn on a closed public street, the better to facilitate selling our wares. It turned out to be a good decision, with performing arts happening on the lawn behind us and selling happening on the street. People were buying pots Saturday, a good sign for the coming summer, in spite of the recession. Sunday was another matter, as the three-day northeaster began blowing and spitting and we all worried a bit about flying tents and rain. I didn't sell a pot until about 3 p.m. It was sloooowwww ... and cold.
I put the gallery back into shape this morning and afternoon, sweeping up and re-arranging pots on shelves as they emerged from their wet paper wrappers after sitting in the back of my pickup more or less in the rain for 36 hours.
The tomato plants in the garden have been blown around and now are staked to keep them from total destruction. Winds have died down as the storm backed out to sea. Tomorrow I have to put handles on some large pitchers that have been barely drying over the past week.
Back to work. Next show is here, with a kiln-opening on July 11.

Work by true "Unknown Craftsmen"

Many of us who make pots know "The Unknown Craftsman" by Yanagi Soetsu. It's long been a sort of handbook for Mingei folkcraft philosophy. But, in fact, though we revere the concept, most of us sign our pots with our names or initials, the better for buyers to find us the next time they want a mug just like the one that holds their morning coffee. True "unknown craftsmen" are hard to find these days, at least in the Western world.
But I found the beautiful work of some anonymous Vietnamese potters last week at the Swanson garden center in Seattle. Wonderful wood-fired garden pots, some of them big enough to hold small trees in hotel or office lobbies, were on sale at Swanson's. The bulging round pot in the top photo was perhaps three feet tall and might hold 50 gallons of soil. It had a monumental and pleasing presence and was on sale for just over $200. It much reminded me of the work of UK potter Svend Bayer and I can guarantee that Bayer gets considerably more than $200 for similar pots.
The remarkable thing about these pots is that they are apparently turned out by the hundreds and thousands at potteries in Vietnam.
I've only done a bit of research and haven't found much written about them, but at http://www.tinhkhoi.com/factory-showroom/factory-showroom.html you can get a look inside the factory and see the vast numbers of pots and the wood kilns used to fire them. Check them out. The quality is excellent. I'd be more than proud to be able to turn out a single pot the size of that one big planter, let alone do it day after day.

Island Gallery: Wonderful wood-fired pots

Last week Dee and I took the ferry from Seattle to nearby Bainbridge Island, in part to eat breakfast at the Big Star Diner (if you're ever on Bainbridge, you should go ... ) but also to drop in on the people at The Island Gallery there (theislandgallery.net). These people make a living selling fine crafts to Bainbridge islanders and visitors, but I go mostly to see good wood-fired pots.
It always seems to me an odd place to find crusty, ash-dripping anagama pots so prominently displayed. (Any place, I suppose, would seem odd that way; anagama pots are not easy to sell to Americans ... ) But there they are. And they are quite wonderful.
Talking with the people there, it's clear that they are suffering like the rest of us in this strangling economy. The gallery recently gave up an adjacent room and now is in a somewhat smaller space. But the smaller space concentrates the work - jewelry, furniture and clothing as well as pots - and the gallery remains a pleasant place to find excellent work. My only complaint might be that they ought to have more pottery by Eastern and Midwestern wood-firers. There are plenty of them. But that might change as the gallery's reputation spreads. They always seem open to hearing about other potters. Chris Gustin, Dan Finnegan, Willi Singleton, Steve Murphy ... there are a bunch of wood potters who would fit perfectly into their collection, and even add a new dimension in style.
I will attach a few photos I made at the gallery, including a stunning pot made by Japanese potter Nobuyuki Kusai, the round jar that appears at the top of this post. I'm told he delivered the Shigaraki clay-coated pot personally to the gallery.

Back to Cape and blogging after the Northwest

This will be brief. We returned on a redeye flight this morning to Boston from Seattle after nine days away. Visited our son Marcus, daughter-in-law Anastasia and their little family of two birds and the new and adorable puppy Hopi. Saturday, we snowshoed at over 5,000 feet at Chinook Pass on Mt. Rainier, while the younger athletes and their friends skied up and down a bit of the mountain. Still lots of mushy snow left on Rainier, and a good deal of fog. Lovely up there.
More tomorrow, including some beautiful wood-fired pots at Bainbridge Island.

A small package from Scotland

The US Mail delivered a small, carefully wrapped box to my front steps this afternoon. It contained a lovely little slipware bowl from my blogging friend Hannah McAndrew of Galloway, Scotland, one of the newest members of Britain's Craft Potters Association. Thank you, Hannah. Maybe I'll take some melitzanosalata in it tonight to our friends Mike and Tammy Race, who invited Dee and me to a fish dinner.
Hannah gave this package over to the Royal Mail on April 9, which is, I think, just a bit more than six weeks ago. Someone must have rowed it across the ocean. But it arrived in one piece. Also in the box was a bag of dried and sieved Solway Firth mud, which ought to be in some sort of ashy glaze in my next firing. Can't wait to see what that does. Maybe I'll combine it with some of the Antarctic mud I've been using. Unite the planet, and all that ...
Thanks, Hannah. You'll be hearing from us.

"I could never drink out of that cup"

I took eight tall, bulky teabowls out of the kiln last week, pots created by digging out clay from the inside of a roughly wedged two-pound cone of brown stoneware clay. Holding the raw clay in my right hand and digging out the inside with a trimming tool in my left resulted in uneven sidewalls, holes accidentally dug through the walls and then patched, rims that broke apart and had to either be left that way or also patched with raw clay. Some rims flared upward on one side of the rough circle, some stayed more or less on the same plane.
None of those things mattered to me. In fact, that was what I hoped would happen. Throwing on a wheel results in even rims, one quadrant on the same plane as its opposite. Even cutting the rim after the first pull, which I often do, still results in ups and downs that play with the plane of the rim but don't deviate from it very much. In these dug-out teabowls, deviation is the norm. Sometimes substantial deviation. I like that.
But it also scares some people. I knew it would. I often take new mugs or teabowls to the coffee shop to try them out, make sure they work, give myself something new to drink from in the morning, make sure people know I'm still making new pots. I brought one of the new teabowls - the left one in the photo above - to Coffee Obsession in Woods Hole Sunday morning. It came in for some informal and lighthearted (I think) "criticism" by the people at the table. One coffee drinker said, "Well, everyone has to start somewhere," to much laughter.
Tuesday at Coffee Obsession in Falmouth (there are two branches of the same great coffee shop), a woman said, "I could never drink out of that cup," speaking of the teabowl on the right in the photo. Another woman agreed that she would spill coffee all over herself if she tried to drink from that particular cup. Which either means she can't figure out how to avoid the single gap in that particular rim - and I know that's not true - or she's just more accustomed to drinking from the kind of vessel you see in the center of the photo.
The fact is, we all become accustomed to certain forms in our lives - whether it's sitting on the left side of the automobile to drive or drinking from a round, evenly rimmed cup with no disturbing unevenness. Take us out of our comfort zone and we're ... uncomfortable.
All of which means I can't stop making mugs like the one in the middle and turn all my production to rough and uneven handbuilt teabowls. No matter how much I like them. Not, at least, if I expect people to buy enough of my work to keep me in clay and natural gas.
I do like the temmoku mug in the middle, in spite of the fact that its funky neighbors make it look rather ordinary. As always, the trick is finding a way to make pots that I like that people will buy.

And a couple more ...

There were more of these square "whiskey cups" in yesterday's firing than anything else. And a few of these taller vases.