Sketching, [Not So] Randomly

 

I just had an eye-opening tutorial, to learn about applying good ol’ Search Engine Optimization* to my website. More on SEO as I get more proficient. This has to be a serious priority for anyone with a website, so that it will show up in online searches. (*I am making place for an SEO hat on my metaphorical hatstand.)

Also, an electrician’s been in to the future gallery (finally!) to assess the work needed for radically improved lighting, and will give me an estimate Monday(ish). Electrical work comes before any other work.  I am going to be the general contractor*. (*Contractor hat, comin’ up.)

So instead of working with clay, being fairly distracted lately, I’ve been taking up pad, pencil and a kneaded eraser (love those) and I'm at least sketching (what else?) pots.

Started drawing spirals, which turned into pearlike shapes. I’ve built something like these out of coils before. But how would they be to make on the wheel and alter, instead? Would make them strictly decorative, and probably glazed simple white.

Also, I incorporated nails into low-fire earthenware years ago (as eye stalks for little monster pots, with wiggle eyes glued on the ends later). How would metal brads be for pear stems, at higher temperature firings like I do now? And could I also cut holes into the upper parts of the pearlike objects and make them into (no longer just decorative) functional flower holders?

Started drawing circles, realized I was still thinking Song Dynasty (see back a few posts), and evolved quickly back to that covered jar shape. It recurs, which means I’d better do this one (out of the new porcelain) just to get it outside my head and see how it goes. Would be wonderful with shellac resist designs.

Something else I’ve had in mind for a long time (see lower left of sketch): pots reminiscent of nests. This is a good sort of pot to throw thickish and carve. Inside would be very, very smooth and strongly or brightly colored, or bright clean white, with the outside stained sheer, matte, twiglike brown. All sizes. Really want to do this. These would be interesting to touch and look at, functional, and could attract birds…OK, not really on that last thing.

Another thing I’ve been thinking of: the sort of lobed pot (lower right of sketch) with a small, shot-glass like shape sort of set in as a rim.  I see this with sheer, light glaze of one color or other. Could be beautiful, or weird, or both.

Still itching to carve pots, so sketched the first two here:

The second from left has my typical leaf carving and the one on the far left has a raised band for carving the life circle and pumpkinlike “lobes.” The second from the right? Just a simple cylinder for a change, with possible underglaze brushwork and carving, maybe in the old Saturday Evening Girls style… And I’m not sure what the heck the pot on the right is, a single covered jar like a pot-within-a-pot; not liking. (Interesting to note that the new camera curved the image in at the edges like it was a wide angle shot. Have to learn the new camera settings better.)

Thinking (above ^) cylindrically some more…but I feel that these look like the light, colorful earthenware sort of pottery you can buy at Home Goods. Heck, my ideas are not all going to be useful ones- sometimes they’re just bad sketches. But all this drawing got me thinking about the simple cylinder shape with minor variations- it needs to feel handmade, or at least as if its surface matters beyond serving as a canvas for assembly line design. I think the cylinder is more challenging to decorate because it is such a clean, blank form that is open to imaginative handling or its opposite, minimal interference. Cylinders are a good exercise for any potter, beginner to expert. They give you room to roam.

Well, back to Search Engine Optimization…so anyone can go to my website and find what s/he is looking for.

Bottle with a Broken Lip

 Stoneware Bottle with Broken Lip

Out of the hot Maine July noon

In a listing antiques barn,

Among the kitsch and jetsam,

This bottle with no handles grabbed me-

With no raised foot, tripped me up.

In the white sun a wince in the height of day

Cool concrete and wood lured my son and me in

Beneath the Picker’s Palace sign-

His baseball cap shading his tumble-haired head

His search focused tight on musical things, and games-

When cheek by jowl to scalloped milk glass

And faded beige satin pincushions

The chipped gray gleam of its little mouth in the gloom

Blew me a kiss. I swear.

I heard the phantom snap of ancient pine ash melting.

We climbed a flight of metal steps

Saw chairs and chests and Esso signs

And came back down with my sturdy boy clutching

A harmonica still in its box, and a dinged-up iron putter

But my hands empty longed for the rich brown bottle.

A freckle of stony bits complicated its skin

Stippled with fly-ash, unsigned, alone, out of place,

The mark of a twisted cutoff wire beneath its narrow bottom,

Its belly swelled with old sweet fire…

I bought it. What was the tiny price? Some paper tag long gone now.

copyright Mimi Stadler 2012

Improved Show Space

This is how I rearranged my space the day after the show, having realized it was too crowded.

Scroll down and compare to the photo two posts ago, when I first set up the show. Lots more room to look at individual pieces!

With a leaf applique fabric piece above (not sure of artist's name but a nice piece of art), and Dario Scholis's paintings at the left, it was a colorful space.

More changes for next time: more poetic (less prosaic) pieces (sorry, no mugs), black tablecloth, banner with my studio's name.

(photo by Susan James)

After the Show: More About the Business of Craft!

The art show at Evalyn Dunn’s Gallery in Westfield, NJ, was Sunday. How was the show, you ask? (Remember that question, and how difficult I find it to reply?)  Short answer: it was a good show, but not because I made so much money. It was a particularly good show because of the intangibles, which are what I learned while interacting, questioning and observing.

I did a sort of post-mortem after a show. What sold? What did not draw interest at all? Did a particular texture or color turn the people on or off? What price point sold better than others? Was the one-of-a-kind work more interesting? Were people willing to spend on a unique piece? Did they want Judaica? Serving pieces? Decorative ware? Did I get names and addresses (email and snail) to add to my mailing list?

Yesterday, I went back to the gallery to help out for a couple of hours. My work is still there for the duration of this week. Susan James, a jeweler who had been in the show, was also helping out. Since the gallery is not usually open Mondays, few customers showed up, and I took the opportunity to rearrange my display. Susan makes her living from her craft all year round, mostly at outdoor shows. She has a sense of what makes a good display. She and Jacie Civins, the owner of the gallery, gave me great feedback, very helpful for my show post-mortem.

By the end of our discussion, I had packed up at least a quarter of the items I had on display. The table and shelves looked better. It now had few multiples of anything. I had shifted groupings by color, instead of by type of object. Jacie pointed to a large vase. “When did that get there?” she asked me. It had been there all along. It was just highlighted now with better placement.

So. "How was the show?"

1)  Because each piece has its own carving or a plate fitted especially to suit it, I believed I make one of a kind work. But it didn't necessarily look like it at the show. Because my carved goblets, for example, were of similar size to one another and stood in a row on one shelf, regardless of differences in their carved decoration, if you didn't look closely, you would have assumed they were all alike. This, Susan told me, is not "special." Unless he or she really wants a pair, or a set, a buyer will usually prefer to have "the only one like it" at a show like this. The remedy is to place objects separately, not as a group of similars, and limit their number- otherwise you get a herd effect. A herd effect can be gorgeous; think of a herd of horses running- but conversely, can also can lower the effective beauty of an individual thing.

2) Price should not reflect only the time, effort and cost expended to make the object. That should just be the floor when setting the $$ amount. Charge for the specialness of the piece. If necessary, get a knowledgeable friend or colleague to help. If you are like me, knowing too much about the making process clouds your objectivity.

3) Each item should be what I want to make. There is a buyer somewhere for every single handmade thing, if made well.  It's not much use planning too rigidly what to make. Jacie and Susan chose to admire pieces that were quite different from one another's. Susan loved a simple, easy to make bowl with a subtle stony glaze, that was particularly graceful. Jacie liked two carved and complexly colored vase forms.

4) Display: Less Really Is More. Clear up a little. If planning to show 8 teacups and saucers that are the same, make them different colors from one another. Or show only one to three at a time, not ten.

5) Yes, this should be obvious, though it wasn't to me-- Color contrast is extremely important. Ware that is green should not be on a green cloth. Put it on a black cloth. And make more of the ware some other color. Not everyone likes green.

6) Again- color! Develop a good palette for more color! More, more, more color! People have a visceral reaction to red. Or blue. Or pure white. Or variegated golden brown.

7) People actually want to pay more sometimes. If the price is too low, it will seem apparent that as an artist, I do not especially value the objects I  make, and neither should the shoppers. Usually, unless it's a mug or a cereal bowl, (and even sometimes then,) a customer has no set of criteria to assess the value of a piece of handmade pottery, except to look at the price tag. If someone wants to give a gift, and the bowl they are looking at is $22, they assume it would be perceived by the recipient as a cheapie gift, and they won't buy it. This is faulty thinking, but common. It does no good to explain that the recipient would not know what the giver had paid. The gift giver will buy a bowl that cost the potter next door just as little to make as your bowl did, but they will assume it is a “better” bowl, because it is marked $42.

Think of it this way. If the bowl is beautiful, and I still price it according to the time it took to make and the cost of materials. I am totally ignoring the intangible something that makes a piece special. So remember- a buyer who "gets" that certain "something" in the work will pay real money for it.

Well, it’s been a busy and informative couple of days. As ever, onward and upward

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.
Time to go box up the pottery for setup at the gallery tomorrow. See you on Sunday!

"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.

Hacked & Troubled

After posting nothing for quite a while, I now post for the second time in a week. Normally I would save this up for a week or so before posting, but I wanted to share this sooner.

Malicious damage was done to me personally this week. My website was hacked. If you go there (http://mimistadlerpottery.com) you will see a red bar telling you this is a “reported attack page.” Uncovering the code, Leah at iPoint Web Design discovered that the hacker operated from Syria, and that attached to the infecting snippets of code were anti-Israel phrases.

My Wordpress website had a vulnerable point of access, and the hacker entered. (I only noticed when Google blacklisted me.) But what drew the attacker there in the first place? Based on the geographic origin of the hacker (probably a machine programmed to do what it did) and the anti-Israel phrases, and taking into account that nowhere does the word “Israel” appear on my site, I make an assumption. In About the Artist, you can read that I am Jewish. And in the meta data, you can see “Judaica” as one of the terms used a lot, and “Jewish holiday” as another. Those had to be the targeted keywords that the mechanical hacking program with the offending code was looking for. Any pretense that Israel (and not Judaism itself) is the reason for hate here, is false. I was targeted because I am Jewish. And because I am Jewish, an Israel-hater would like me harmed.

As hate crimes go, this one is relatively benign. It prevents me from carrying on my e-commerce, of course, and this is a pretty unpleasant situation for me. But I am a studio potter, not a school, let’s say, or a business with numerous employees. Hacking my site affects only me and no one else. Indirectly, you might even conjecture that in a back-handed way I gained, as the security on my site, which was weak, is greatly improved now, and the code in general got quite a nice tightening up. Assuming Google un-blacklists me soon, the harm done could be considered pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But the stupidity of attacking a peace-loving clay spinner, who desires to live gently and do no harm to this earth or its people, and to attack me because I am Jewish, is indeed troubling.

I've Got the Many-Day-No-Clay-pre-Reno Blues

This is what used to be: a big mess. I had a jewelry corner filled to bursting with beads and wire, and a cabinet of out-of-date office machines. There were three folding tables, and about 80 pieces of pottery on tables, stands and shelves. Long ago, I had improvised onother table of cinder blocks and a board, and yet two more tables of sawhorses and boards. It all stood in the drab, poorly lit space I want to call The Gallery Downstairs. (I can’t yet; but you can bet I’m going to, when it loses its sad old vinyl floor and stops being a playground for mouse visitors).

First on the agenda was saying bye bye to that mouse and any of its family. I set traps, found and sealed a hole, and hung a Not Welcome sign below the sink that read, Adios, ratons.

The cabinet full of defunct office machines took up prime real estate. Machines were sent elsewhere so that I had a big, empty cabinet. It filled up quickly with the collection of beads (thousands, in many little drawers), spools of wire, and all other non-clay craft supplies. I kept the jewelry bench and my tools out, though. An artisan always has use for good files and pliers and a Flexi-Shaft tool for fine cutting, polishing and drilling.

I packed up the pottery in bubble wrap and old clean towels and boxed it for storage. There was more pottery than bubble wrap, so I loaded up the ware cart and rolled the rest of the pots to the kiln room in shifts, where they’ve been transferred to shelves. Tired and far from done, I took a little "Pot Drop therapy", also known as the Breaking of the Pottery, which not only kept me calmer but also rid the studio of bad “seconds.” This activity is surprisingly good for releasing negative energy. The only downside is sweeping up after.

Too nice to give away, too sentimentally connected to sell, boxes of my mother-in-law’s china and keepsakes from her house got hauled from their old home beneath the open gallery steps and were stowed upstairs to an attic crawl space instead.

We have yet to roll the extra fridge out of the future gallery and into the laundry/extra kitchen-ish room, but when we do, there will be more room yet to display art.

With tables folded, sawhorses too, big boards stowed away, three ugly old bookshelf units emptied of children's toys and pottery and removed; (with that attic area also cleaned and the toys relocated to it;) with eight cinder blocks hauled out back under the deck; suddenly you can see lots of floor.

Tony the Floor Man came to talk estimates with me, for putting down a new vinyl floor. The price was twice my expectation.

Robert the Electrician came to discuss wiring, upgrading the existing can lights to show the work better, and adding adjustable spot lighting. He could not give me a price because I have yet to figure out the display shelving and thus the placement of spotlights. Robert is a stickler for code and safety, and he’s slow and meticulous. I expect better lighting to cost fully as much as the floor.

Meanwhile, a hacker attacked my website yesterday, and it was blacklisted on Google and made inaccessible to the public. Leah at iPoint Web Design is on a search and destroy mission as I write this.

Very long story made very short, it’s been a while since I had my hands in clay. Withdrawal symptoms are too many to enumerate… sing with me...I've got the Many-Day-No-Clay-pre-Reno Ba-lllu-uuues!

A Hiatus, and Studio Plans

Out of the studio for all of December, of necessity, I found it hard to sleep. With my hands not busy in all things clay, my mind compensated by percolating way overtime during the night.

Plans for studio improvements have been going down on paper. I have little post-it bits cut to scale that I am moving around the rough floor plan sketch, representing potter's wheel, ware carts and tables. The new layout is a work in progress.

The pottery in the gallery part of the studio is still partly packed up from the show I was in the first Sunday in December. I have more pots to box up, tables to fold away, cinder blocks to take away, a jewelry kiln and supplies to sell, and many, many beads to store somewhere else. The jewelry corner is going to become the bookkeeping, sales and pack-and-ship corner. The rest of the gallery plan is for a new floor, much better lighting that can be adjusted to spotlight the work, fresh paint on the walls, and a much improved display system.

The clay and glaze areas are going to be switched, with a wall removed in the process and, I hope, some glass doors between the gallery and the very dusty studio.

I've made drawings of pots. There's a small pile of drawings on the beds in the spare room. Here's a page of items I'm thinking about for the Gift Registry I want to put on my website.

There's a bookmark migrating slowly through The Business of Being an Artist. I'm in the website marketing section. I hope this will be helpful. Not sure yet.

I have a new, super nice business card. Shaindy P. cheerfully steered me through 12 adaptations. She swapped the work for studio time. This is the best kind of barter. A good time was had by all.

What happens to a one-person studio operation when the one person is temporarily out of commission? My wrist has to heal before I can push and pull clay, but heck, I can stay up nights, planning. And I can line up helpers... Studio time, anyone?

Who Won the Honey Jar Set?

I've been a little under the weather and out of the studio, so you haven't heard from me in a while. But I want to post the result of the raffle drawing from my last show finally, in case you didn't see it on my Mimi Stadler Pottery Facebook page!

Shana Lowell now owns a lovely black honey jar set.

Shana has been having a lucky streak with my raffles! When I post the next one, give Shana a run for her money! Enter!

Win a Free Raffle, Get a Really Nice Honey Jar

I'm celebrating being in this good show by offering a free raffle to browsers here, at the show, and also on my Mimi Stadler Pottery page on Facebook.

The very nice piece of pottery being given is a black honey jar with a few turquoise dots. It comes with its own plate and stoneware dipper. It's a nice size for lots of honey, or, with a spoon instead of a dipper, makes an excellent jam jar.

This is FREE. It would be awesome if you would come to the show, to which I previously posted an invitation, (and bring friends!) and fill out a raffle ticket there. But if you can't come, and you live in the U.S., you can send me an e-mail at mimi@mimistadlerpottery.com, with Enter Me for the Honey Jar Raffle! in the subject line, and I will enter you into the drawing automatically.

I will draw a ticket from the jar around 9 p.m. Sunday, December 4th, 2011. Go for it!

Come to the Show!

Leading up to a show, life is always a bit busier. The vessels are mostly made, with a glaze kiln still firing as I write this, and one more glaze fire to do. Now the vessels must be priced and tagged, inventoried, wrapped and boxed. New business cards are almost ready. A few more show invitations must go out. After that, an hour's drive and a show setup, and then it’s just ‘enjoy the show’.

Come visit my booth and see what I've been up to, at the

show I am in Sunday, December 4th, at Nanuet Hebrew Center (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.) at 411 South Little Tor Road, New City, NY!

Becoming an artist bit by bit is certainly work. The learning-by-doing never ends. Ever and always, there’s room to improve. I’ve been complimented on my “talent.” While the early bud of talent took me a step or two along, the desire to learn and years of practice took over from there a long time ago. Willingness to work hard and develop skills became my pottery life. It is ongoing. I aspire, like the art potter Beatrice Wood, (click on her name to see a video of the amazing Beatrice) to work and develop my craft till I’m 105, and plain old talent sure isn’t going to get me there.

Pottery at its best has very little to do with what you do at a paint-your-own place. Nobody provides the “bisque” ready for you to “paint.” It has everything to do with taking an idea and a lump of clay, and following the idea through until a special object is created. Sometimes you’ve made something poetic. Sometimes you've made a vessel that needs to be part of a chain of vessels, where the first ones will be an idea with promise, and the last ones will be poems.

Hope to see you on Sunday!

The Way It's Supposed to Be

I think this is the way it’s supposed to be in a business. Busy, and varied.
Tureen (not pictured but it's a nice one!), Seder plate and teacups are drying on the rawware shelves.

Someone is creating a new, better business card for me.
Someone else is fixing a broken Contact link on my website (which, if you haven’t seen it in a while, is http://mimistadlerpottery.com).
I am discussing details with someone else about the space I will have at an art show in Nanuet, NY on December 4th.
Bisqued tureens with vinelike handles, and salad bowls with raised (shellac resist) designs cover the table in the glazing area as they await coats of glaze.

My electric kiln moves well along towards 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, loaded with glazed tureens and more. You can't see the heat, and it looks cold and prosaic in this photo,

but this kiln is the facilitator of poetic unions. When I put the pots into the kiln they wore coats of powdery dry raw glaze, but right now, every glaze in the kiln is molten stuff, insinuating itself in a close and gleaming interface with the skin of the pot it is clinging to. It's like the core of the earth, only cooler, with rock melting and re-forming.
And last but not least, the room where I display the finished pottery between shows is my next big project. It will turn into the Gallery Downstairs. With some de-cluttering, added lighting and shelves, paint and new flooring, and the addition of the work of a few friends to enhance the collection, it should become quite a nice place to visit.

If at First (2nd, 3rd, 4th) You Don't Succeed...

A customer asked me for really nice, big handmade tureens to give as wedding gifts. It’s been a long time since I made any, and since all I could make were small ones back then, I’m glad to have the challenge of making a new item.

So I made a group of big tureens over a couple of weeks. They really are the perfect serving pieces for soup, or your-mama’s-recipe chulent, or whatever hot food item you want to look extra nice and keep hot when you bring it to the table.

This took place in the last few weeks before the freak snowfall, when the leaves were changing colors and the gourds in the farms and markets were making their splashy debut. I thought of squash and pumpkins as I worked, and some tureens grew vines and leaves for handles.

I've applied handles for two dozen years and more. For some reason, I used (do not fear, this is a really isolated instance!) too light a hand when pressing handles onto two of the tureens. So these nice, curvy, textured handles began to separate from the pots. They were a bit too dry to fix, so I took them off completely, smoothed the spots where they were inadequately joined, and I now have two tureens that have a handleless, clean, modern style. Accidental design! The other, handled tureens will be easier to carry to the table, though. All in all, nine lidded tureens are drying, almost ready to go into the kiln.

Today I woke up with a seder plate design in my head. I think it could work this time. (Hope springs eternal!) Over the years, I’ve designed and tried at least five Seder plate versions with various levels of complexity, from way simple to image-heavy. Some were fairly nice but none, in my opinion, was quite right. THIS is the one. (I’m telling you, THIS IS THE ONE.) Try and try again. (If this one is NOT the one, I will try again.) I made the first one today, the trial run, all except for the little dishes and the graphics, which I plan to do tomorrow. The handbuilt plate is firming up, upside down on a piece of upholstery foam, on the slab roller table in the studio. Can't wait to turn it right side up tomorrow. Here's hoping I'm right about it being The One. Photos soon. And I hope to put up some new tureens on my website in about two weeks.

Peering From Under the Brim

Have to grow into some of these hats a potter wears...

Videographer. Turns out one needs more clean hands than I possess when attempting to film videos of oneself making pottery. Will need a guest videographer from time to time. Especially a videographer able to get to iMovie and edit! Will trade wheel time. (Apply to potter for opportunity.)

Gallery owner: It's true, dust and disorder make a poor setting for clean, shiny pots. Also, people visiting the in-person gallery (my euphemism for a certain pottery-filled portion of our basement) expect price tags on the pots. Why, I don’t know… I price-stickered lots of pots yesterday, dusted shelves, and removed the ironing board from the "gallery." Will need helpful husband to move junk out of the basement for me very soon so all euphemisms can be done away with, and a real gallery, without quotation marks, will materialize. Brought helpful husband downstairs to visualize this yesterday, Step One.

Website marketer or, PR department: “Hello. I'm a potter. How are you? I have a website. If you get the chance, you should go there. It’s really pretty. And everything there is for sale." Ew. There has to be a more professional way. Informing one person at a time is a pretty slow way to go, too. Will need excellent advice from Number One Son, Marketing Expert.

Like all things, these are sorting themselves out inch by inch. The "hat rack" is crammed with new hats that are still too big.

New goals arise weekly. If I fall a bit behind on the blog, it's because I can't see under the big ol' hat that's fallen over my eyes.

Happy and sweet new year, Shana Tova u’Metuka! May it be healthy, fulfilling and prosperous all around!