Farraday Newsome
Artist Statement
My home and studio are in the Sonoran desert city of Mesa, Arizona. I share my studio with fellow ceramic artist and husband, Jeff Reich.
I have worked within the format of the vessel for over thirty years, exploring ideas of lushness, sadness, time, and grace. My surfaces are very painterly. I am interested in the combination of painterly space with the actual space of the three-dimensional piece. For the past five or six years I have been glazing fields of natural and artificial objects that have personal symbolic meaning. These are generally familiar objects, such as watches, fruit, dice, shells, seedpods, eyeglasses, bones and insects. My personal narrative becomes a freeform drift open to association.
My clay is a red terra cotta. The first layer on my bisque ware is a coat of either white glaze or black glaze. This sets up a general light or dark atmosphere, and emotional intent can be developed from there. My imagery is built up by brushing multiple layers of colored glazes on top of the white or black glaze ground.