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October 2011 Newsletter

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!

August 13, 2011: 2011 Annual Art Auction, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado www.andersonranch.org

May of 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

4 New Maiolica Book by Daphne Carnegy

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

4 Neil Tetkowski: Guest Artist at Mesa Arts Center, Arizona

5 Indigo Street Pottery Landscape Notes

email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

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email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

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April 2012 Newsletter

Archived Newsletters

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

2. Upcoming Show at Plinth Gallery, Denver, CO

3.Jeff Reich: Wall Piece Commission in Progress

4. New Maiolica Book by Daphne Carnegy

5. Neil Tetkowski: Guest Artist at the Mesa Arts Center, AZ

6. Indigo Street Pottery Landscape Notes

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!

March 28 - 31, 2012: La Mesa, Santa Fe Clay, NCECA 2012 Seattle, Act Theatre, Seattle, Washington http://www.santafeclay.com/

May 4-26, 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

May 5-6, 2012: Farraday Newsome hands-on workshop at Plinth Gallery http://plinthgallery.com/

July 26 - October 21, 2012: Contemporary Ceramics, Tohono Chul Park Gallery, Tucson, Arizona http://www.tohonochulpark.org/wordpress/

August 11-12, 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome will be conducting a hands on workshop in St. Albert, Alberta, Canada for the St. Albert Potters Guild http://www.stalbert.ca/history

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

Left: The locally native Sonoran wolfberry (Lycium species) near our kiln shed has a huge fruit crop this year. We love these tasty, native fruits and do many native birds,such as the Curve Billed Thrasher. This fruiting, thorny shrub is very closely related to the commercially important Lycium barbarum, known as Goji berry, which is highly prized for its healthy, antioxidant-rich fruit.

Mark Dimmit of the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson writes: Nearly every part of the Sonoran Desert has at least one species of Lycium. The structure of the flowers suggests bee pollination, and bees do visit them profusely, but butterflies and hummingbirds also visit in great numbers. Birds relish the fruits. People also highly value the small, tasty berries as a snack..

http://www.desertmuseumdigitallibrary.org/public/detail.php?id=ASDM08603&sp=Lycium%20brevipes

Right: Gray Thorn (Zizyphus obtusifolia), with its rangy, thorny branches, is a perennial inspiration to Jeff’s sculpture and pottery sgraffito surfaces. This photo shows the shrub in its very short season of leafiness. The leaves will drop off as the temperature rises, leaving just the gracefully meandering linework of wildly thorny branches. Gray Thorn is a Sonoran desert native, a member of the buckthorn family.

3 Jeff Reich: Wall Piece Commission in Progress

Images of Farraday’s work, as well as and text describing her techniques and thoughts on maiolica, are included in this new book by British author and studio artist Daphne Carnegy. The book is published by A & C Black in London and by The University of Pennslyvania Press in the USA.

Publisher’s description:

Whether called maiolica or majolica, vivid tin-glazed ceramics have delighted pottery lovers for centuries with a depth and luminosity that cannot be achieved using other decorative techniques. This unique ceramic process offers endless possibilities for functional pieces as well as more sculptural works. Ceramicists who wish to begin exploring this historic and increasingly popular coloring method will find everything they need to know in Maiolica, a handbook by celebrated potter and educator Daphne Carnegy.

This practical, concise guide covers the essential steps of creating maiolica ware, from clay selection to glaze firing. In a down-to-earth tone, Daphne Carnegy explains how to choose the right clay body, compose glazes, and use glaze application techniques such as brushwork, wax resist, decals, lusters, and enamels. Maiolica includes glaze recipes and a chapter on troubleshooting, as well as important health and safety information. Each procedure and concept is presented in clear detail, accompanied by color photographs and easy-to-read tables. In addition to providing how-to instruction, this inspiring book celebrates maiolica traditions as far back as ninth-century Mesopotamia. It also shares useful insights from many of the best artists working in the medium today.

With 100 full-color illustrations and supportive instruction from one of the world's finest potters, this beautiful and useful book is an excellent choice for novice potters and ceramics teachers alike.

Fern and Red Shell Cloud Tile, Farraday Newsome. An image of this wall-hanging piece is included in Daphne Carnegy’s Maiolica (Ceramics Handbook), published April 2011, p. 74

Neil Tetkowski was a guest artist in March at the Mesa Arts Center (Mesa, Arizona) where Jeff Reich directs the Ceramics Program. Neil is a wonderfully engaging and energetic ceramic artist with an international exhibition record and reputation. We felt so fortunate to have him in our midst for his two weeks here. Not only did he work hard creating a new body of cell phone-imprinted disks that speak to communication in our cellular age, but he also totally loved trail running in the desert with us!

Photos above, clockwise from top left: Neil Tetkowski at the Mesa Arts Center Ceramics Studio pressing out the beginnings of a large disk on the wheel with MAC assistant Steve Wolf looking on; imprint of a cell phone in Neil’s disc; Neil at work while Farraday (right) and MAC Artist-in-Residence and Studio Manager Jesse Armstrong (left) photograph him; Neil with old cell phones, Jeff Reich in blue, and Farraday Newsome in orange; Neil experimenting with various earth oxides mixed in oil and painted on paper; Neil pressing cell phones into a freshly thrown clay disk.

From the artist bio on Neil’s website http://www.tetkowski.com/index.html :

Born in 1955, Neil Tetkowski’s early years were spent in Siena, Italy where he went to grammar school for several years. Both parents were in the arts providing an early foundation for what would become a lifetime passion for creativity, education and a fascination with diverse cultures of the world. Before his tenth birthday he had visited museums and cultural landmarks in more than twenty countries.

Neil Tetkowski’s material of choice comes directly from the Earth. Most often he uses clay, which he believes is the perfect medium to express his relationship to the natural environment. Since 1980, Tetkowski has exhibited his artwork in galleries and museums. He has a special interest in Japanese culture and has had three solo exhibitions in Tokyo. Tetkowski’s work has been exhibited at the International Art Biennale, in Beijing, China. Additionally, the artist has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Ford Foundation grant. His artwork is widely published and placed in permanent collections of 45 museums including the Victoria and Albert in London, the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American Art, in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

In 2000, Tetkowski conceived and built a sculpture at the United Nations using a blend of earth materials from every nation. There he physically involved people from every country of the world. The Common Ground World Project was officially endorsed at the United Nations as an environmental project and was exhibited in its completed form in 2002 at the Visitor’s Lobby in New York.

Neil Tetkowski holds degrees from Alfred University and from Illinois State University. He has been a professor at Denison University in Ohio, the State University College at Buffalo and at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Neil Tetkowski lives in Manhattan and is the Director of University Galleries at Kean University in Union, New Jersey.

Jeff and Farraday have a two-person show at Plinth Gallery in Denver, Colorado in May. Exhibition dates are May 4-26, 2012. The opening will be Friday evening May 4th during First Friday. We are getting excited about the show and the trip! Farraday will be conducting a two-day hands-on workshop that weekend at Plinth Gallery as well. http://plinthgallery.com/exhibitions/

Jeff is currently working on a seven-piece wall sculpture for a private commission. Here you can see some of the finished pieces and some of the greenware drying. Jeff uses a special order dark, rough, cone 10 clay called Black Mountain Sculpture. Jeff’s work is glaze reduction-fired to cone 10 in our studio’s 40-year-old West Coast gas kiln.

Lavender-flowering Solanum tridynamum (that we got at the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson) and a variegated Agave angustifolia

Farraday Newsome, Night Drift Teapot, glazed terra cotta, 9 x 13.75 x 8.5”, 2012

Jeff Reich, Agave Fields, glazed stoneware, 8 x 14 x 9”, 2012