23. THE POTTERY OF MATA ORTIZ

Hello Potters and Friends,

In this post I thought I would tell you a story.
From the moment that I read about the extraordinary life of Juan Quezada and the Mata Ortiz potters, I have retained such vivid pictures in my mind, and I frequently study the photographs of their work, which inspires me to keep creating and learning.

Here is the man himself.   

Juan Quezada.

So, the story begins in the early 1960's in Mexico. Juan was a teenage boy in Mata Ortiz and his job was to take his two mules to the forests on the outskirts of the town and collect firewood for his family.

As with a lot of boys he loved exploring, and nothing was more exciting than searching the caves on the mountain side where a lost civilisation of Mexican Indians once lived. 

As well as the firewood he began bringing back fragments of painted pottery and sometimes even a complete pot that was made six or seven hundred years before. This collecting soon developed into wanting to know how to make such beautiful pots himself. But no-one in the town knew.  So he began digging for clay around the mountains. If this is where the ancients lived then their clay must be nearby. He experimented with different dyes to re-create the ornate paintings, and after some time he finally discovered black manganese that he ground down then added water. 

He had no tools, no teacher, only trial and error. 

A potter using Juan's tried and tested method.

He tried baking his pots in a fire-pit covered with a small metal drum and used cow manure for fuel. Eventually it worked!

His family became interested in what their young boy was producing and wanted to try their hand at it too, so he began teaching them as well as anyone else who wanted to learn.

Mata Ortiz was a small dusty town in those days, lacking just about everything, especially work. Industries had come and gone leaving behind a community that found life hard. There was not much else to do but make pots and sell them in the next town or to travellers.

And a junk shop called Bob's Swap Shop in New Mexico is the unlikely location that changed the fortunes of Mata Ortiz.

Some travelling salesmen offered to take a selection of Juan's pots to the United States to see if there was a market for them there. However, at Bob's Swap Shop they exchanged them for clothes instead. But what a lucky exchange that turned out to be. The pots were bought by an American art historian called Spencer MacCallum, who, fortunately, had a fascination for junk shops.

At first he thought they were the original Indian pots, but soon discovered that they were modern, very modern. So he set out to find the potter. And very quickly he did. MacCallum was so in awe of the boy's talent and tenacity that he offered him a monthly salary if he would keep making pots. It seemed to be a gift from heaven. Everyone joined in.

 Some built the fires; some sanded and smoothed the leather-hard pots; some coiled and shaped; some dug for clay and oxides; some painted patterns; some wrapped and packaged. They had a new industry and Juan Quezada was at its helm.

Today there are 400 potters who live and work in Mata Ortiz and their economy has changed dramatically.

Their pots are sold worldwide and are still made in exactly the same way as they were 50 years ago. 

The brushes used for the fine painting are still made from strands of children's hair.

In 1999 Juan Quezada was awarded The National Art Award by the Mexican government – the greatest honour given to any artist in the country.

Many websites and Youtube videos well document the many artists, their pottery and their techniques.

So take a look, sit back, and be amazed.  

Happy Potting Folks!

  

22. Coloured Clays and Castles

Hello Potters and Friends,

First things first - I promised to give you Alan's best tomato soup recipe, so here are my home-grown, purple tomatoes ready for the job.

Why do I never pick courgettes, or zucchini, when they're small and sweet? 

Ingredients;  Tomatoes (Fresh or tinned)

                     1 Onion

                     Split Red Lentils (not too many, about 3 ounces)

                     Vegetable Stock

                     1 heaped tea spoon of dried thyme.

  

1. Fry the chopped onions in a sauce pan for about 5 minutes.

2. Halve and add your tomatoes to the onions.

     (you can add canned toms at this point if you want to make loads like me.)

3. Throw in the washed red lentils.

4. Add a couple of pints of stock and a generous sprinkling of dried thyme.

    Lid on and simmer for half an hour.

    Liquidise in your whizzer and eat immediately or freeze for later.   Delicious !

Now, I am someone who cannot throw clay away, no matter how contaminated it might be. So I keep a collection of small, smelly pots containing different coloured clays, that are the leftovers and scraps of  stained and oxide-mixed clays.  

They may look and, certainly, smell awful but they really are useful.

I take a small handful from one of the dishes and kneed it into a ball to make sure there are no air bubbles. I then cut the ball into 3 or 4 slices. Then take your chosen white stoneware or, better still, porcelain and cut that into 3 or 4 slices. Now you can make one large ball by layering alternate colours; white clay/coloured clay/ white clay/ and so on until you have something that looks like a huge Liquorice All Sort sweet. Wedge up the mixed layers and either hand-build with it or throw it on the wheel.

   Wheel thrown, then turned before bisque firing.

Because such a lot of water is used when throwing, you find that your pot comes off the wheel as all one purple-coloured mess. Where's all the lovely swirls and layers gone, you cry.  Just keep your nerve. When it has dried to leather-hard - your turning stage - pop it back on the wheel and with a good, sharp, metal tool start to turn off that top messy layer and the lovely pattern will be revealed.

I'll dip these pots into a transparent glaze, whereby I'm expecting the purple swirls to change into browns and greys. And of course, I'll be posting the results when they're out of the kiln.

But, alongside this I am still working on my commissions that I got from from Warwickshire Open Studios Exhibition. 

Table centre-piece. Stoneware.

Table centre-pieces. Porcelain.  

 Stoneware clay bowl, having had lace rolled into it.

It should look similar to this original.

But while I spent so much time in the workshop last week, outside we saw the last beautiful, sunny days of autumn. So Rosie and I took ourselves off to the small, but glorious, Mill Garden that stands at the foot of the majestic Warwick Castle.

Rosie.

Me under the Ghost Tower. 

William the Conqueror ordered this castle to be built on the River Avon in 1068 so that it stood as a symbol of his power over the people of this new territory, the Midlands. Over the centuries many battles, executions and murders took place here. Hence the dungeons and ghost tower.

Oooooooooooooh..................

Happy Potting Folks.

21. Miniature Pots and Oh, la, la !

Hello Potters and Friends,

.....and Bonjour from Honfleur in Normandy.

Alan and I have left the summer sun in France and have been greeted by the long, shadowy, autumn days of Leamington Spa. Leaves are yellowing now and will soon be turning red before they fall. The tomatoes in my greenhouse are ripening quicker than I can eat them. Alan's tomato soup will soon be on the menu again. I'll be giving you his recipe for this, 'oh so easy but oh so delicious ' soup in my next post.

But let's crack on with the potting news.

Before going to France I started working with porcelain again, and although, as I've said before, it's quite tricky at first, constant practice is the answer.

Here are some of the results after unloading the kiln from their first bisque firing.

  

As you can see I've been making, not just small, but miniature pots.

These dinky little pots are very attractive and were very popular at my open studio exhibition in July. They're also great fun to make.

Some will be dipped in a clear glaze which will give the porcelain that translucent look, but some I'll leave unglazed in order to retain the pure whiteness that only porcelain can achieve. 

The unglazed pots I have burnished while still on the wheel as part of the turning stage.

This method takes the hard work out of the constant rubbing with the spoon and the clay takes on a silky, soft feel that makes you want to pick it up and just hold it.

So now on to glazing.

I dip pots more than any other glazing method. If the piece is a bowl, plate, cup or any wide topped pot I use these special tongues which makes glazing easy.

But I can't use them on small pieces, or on the moon pots I love making that have tiny openings, so this is how I do it.

Where my thumb has covered the rim I touch it with a finger dipped in glaze. When it dries out you'll find a lump of glaze on the rim and maybe even drips where the glaze ran off. 

 Don't leave them. I wait 24 hours so that the glaze is bone dry and very powdery, then a gentle rub with a finger will take them away.

These cups were worked on in exactly this way.

But look what I brought back from a brocante (a sort of car boot sale) in Lisieux.

A Delft plate, milk churn and a completely over-the-top soup tureen. Who could resist it??

  

What splendour. Chateau de St. Germain de Livet. Over-the-top residence? 

Not at all.

Vive la différence 

Happy Potting Folks.

20. Out with the Old and in with the New.

Hello Potters and friends,

So, what's out and what's new? Here's the answer.....

My kiln has had a bit of a face-lift this week.

The elements began to pop out of their grooves, to the extent that I got quite worried. They still worked OK but I knew they would soon interfere with the shelves, props and, heaven help us, the pots themselves.

I checked out this problem on the web, hoping for a quick and easy solution. I was advised to do all manner of things from,  'do nothing until it all goes bang', to, 'heat up the kiln to 500ºC, then switch off, but with blow-torch at the ready start pushing them back in.' 

Want to hear my advice?   -   Don't!   Pay for an expert to replace them for new.

When the old elements came out they shattered like thin glass as they touched the floor. You can see all the broken ends in the picture, and the rest, which was in 1 centimetre bits, had to be swept up.

My lovely repairer, who had travelled some miles from Stoke-on-Trent, did it all in an hour and added U-shaped pins to hold the new lot in. 

So, as the weather got hotter and hotter this week, reaching an unbelievable 33ºC, I have been very happy to retreat to the cool of the basement and get on with experimenting with throwing porcelain. 

If you haven't tried working with porcelain then I can only describe it as...different. 

It's softer than stoneware and a lot more plastic when wet.  If I pulled the walls a bit too thin then I had a collapse on my hands. It was like learning to throw all over again. Then, lifting the pot from the wheel  was very dodgy at first, as it seemed to move around and lose it's shape. But these qualities are not all bad. I had a pot go off centre quite dramatically yesterday, and because of it's elastic nature, it was very easy to run my hands up the pot and bring it back to centre.   

  

I use Ming Porcelain from Scarva Supplies in Northern Ireland.

There are many different porcelains and each one may react differently but, for the moment, I'm going to stick with this one.

You'll see there is a ridge just above the pattern. This is because I threw the wall thicker than I would normally to prevent that collapse, so at the turning stage I began paring it away, but had to stop above the pattern. I really liked this effect of a pot within a pot, and so I turned other pots in the same way.

I'll probably adopt this as my porcelain style. No-one needs to know that I threw the tops too thick!

I burnish the bases of flat bottomed pots before putting my stamp on them, as it stops hairline cracks appearing that may have been due to uneven drying out. 

So, we're all still learning. There is always something new to have a go at. I'm really enjoying working with a clay that feels so different to what I'm used to. It's making me take a second look at my technique, and it may change the shape and form of the next lot of pots I make. 

You might like to see some of the finished commissioned pots that have been waiting for the kiln to have its face-lift.

The miniature salt pots with flat spoons below.

The spoons needed to be so small and thin that I had to make them out of porcelain. Stoneware would have definitely cracked. The pattern stamped into the rounded end I designed to hold the grains of salt.

2 kitchen utensil pots looking suitably ethnic, I hope, as required.

And last but by no means least!

While having a cup of tea in the garden yesterday, I sat watching our tiny harvest mouse visitor.

Luckily he didn't run away when I called out to Alan to fetch his camera. 

So, relax in the summer sun.

Enjoy the garden visitors.

Think creative thoughts

and

Happy Potting Folks.

19. The Price is Right.

Hello Potters and Friends,

Well, I said I'd discuss the pricing of my pots, so here I go.
It's a really difficult subject but I think it's important for us all to share our points of view on the subject. So this is how I try to tackle it.

Firstly, I think we all would agree that we shouldn't over-price, nor under-price our work but aim for a fair price.
I make, mainly, functional pots, i.e. mugs, bowls, jugs....what Simon Leach calls "repeat ware".
I also make pots that are individual  - the one-offs.  So I have two different types, two different pricings.

I make the 'repeat ware', as the name suggests, in batches and can throw them on the wheel fairly quickly.
People tend to buy mugs and such-like tableware in sets, so it makes sense to bear this in mind when setting a price. The acid test, as with all pricing - is, would I pay this amount for these cups?

I sell small coffee cups at £7 or £7.50 each.  The spoon rests (front of the table) £5 each. So a set of 4 cups is £28 or £30. To my mind, that is about right. If I raise the price people might go away with one or two at most. Or even worse, go to their local store and buy mass produced crockery.
Price is also important in another way too. People want to feel comfortable as they wander around your studio or showroom. We want them to think that they've made a very good choice. This is the right place for them.  Have you ever found yourself in an expensive shop, quickly realising that there is absolutely nothing you could afford? But once in, you feel trapped. It can make you go a little cold sometimes, and getting out of the door is all you can think about.
But a simple solution is to visit lots of other pottery shows and check out their prices.

Some people have tried to encourage me to put up my prices on my functional ware. But I've seen the results of over-pricing. There has been a drop off of sales and a build-up of unsold work, which inevitably leads to a stagnation in the workshop - not to mention a dip in reputation.

But the one-off individual pots are different.  I don't make 20 an hour. As everyone is a new product, there is more experiment and creative thought involved, as well as labour. Inevitably, the price of these pots reflects this.

But the important thing is to keep potting, keep learning and keep up the enthusiasm.

But now, back to this week. Mugs are still very much high on my agenda, and it's been a dozen handles in particular.

I had a bad start working with clay that was far too soft. I couldn't get the handle to retain its shape, it flopped about, it split and finally I had to scrape it off the cup and start again. 

I took some fresh clay and wedged it up good and proper! I rolled out my handle and left it on newspaper while I had a cup of tea. Catching the clay at the right moment is crucial but my advice is keep testing it and don't be tempted to roll out too thin. Firstly it will look like you've been mean with the clay, and secondly, it's more liable to show cracking as you bend it. 

Before fixing this one on a coffee cup, I was able to decorate it with a toothed tool.

But it hasn't been all work and no play. And I even got Alan away from the Olympics on TV.

Here we are with the flamingos at Peter Scott's Wildlife Park, Slimbridge, Gloucestershire.

They know how to show off to the visitors!

Rosie, with her flamingo red hair. I love it!

Bye, for now 

and

Happy Potting Folks

18. Customers Know What They Want.

Hello Potters and Friends,

Well, I'm back, and raring to go!! And about time too, I hear you cry.
Alan and I had a great holiday in rural France in June, and the Warwickshire Open Studio fortnight has just finished. So, after quite a long absence from my basement, I'm pleased to be up to my elbows in clay-slop again.
So first, the Open Studios; a great success for all of us. I had a varied amount of pots so it was interesting to see what people liked most.

I'm not sure if it was a good idea to use a black cloth for this display, even though most of the pots were white. Most of what I sold was presented in other parts of the studio.

My daughter, Rosie, at our private view.

But looking back over the event, it's good to take stock of what was most popular.

Without a doubt, the grab jugs won hands down.

I find that jugs are always popular, but these handleless ones - used for cream in the 1930's - just caught everyone's attention. 

Also, the large bowls that I've been hand-building for some time never lose their appeal.

They're about 12 inches in diameter, with roughly sprayed glazes over copper oxide. But the comments are mostly about the ragged, ripped edge.

Cups and mugs are another good seller but I obviously didn't make enough as I have to add another 12 to my commission list.

Some artists don't like taking on commissions, but I have to say that I enjoy being forced to think along lines that have certain constraints. I find that it brings out new ideas that I wouldn't have considered.

Here are a couple of examples....

Stage 1 of kitchen utensil pots. 8 inches high, 5 inches diameter.

No, never would I have thought of this without being asked. Nothing too big, ethnic look, white glaze with maybe a touch of oxide. 

How I enjoyed making these. I rolled out the clay, then wrapped it around a tube - any cylinder shaped object covered with newspaper to prevent sticking will do - gave them a bottom, decorated with slip, a couple of holes and marked with the end of a chopstick. They could also be vases, and why not?

  

Cups, after being turned.

I was asked to make some cups a bit taller than I have previously. I had to re-think my usual bellied shape, and I wanted to avoid making them look like any ordinary cylinder.

After a good hour of drawing I came up with this and I'm really pleased so far. Please God, don't let me ruin them all with a terrible handle.

Now, here's something I could never have anticipated!!

Miniature Salt Pots.

I displayed some of my small test pots along the back of a shelf to show how I test glazes and oxides before using them on the proper pots. Before you could say 'Pass the condiments, please" there was a sudden rush to buy them and even to ask me to make a whole bunch more to be used as salt dishes. Brilliant. Objects that I no longer had a use for, turned out to be much needed vessels for the table. 

But all this production this week has filled my damp cupboard to bursting point. So, off to the shops I went, never mind the clay-splattered trousers, and picked up this little 4 drawer beauty for less than £20.

It's perfect for smallish pots, and takes up very little space in my crowded workshop.

In my next post I'm going to talk about that very difficult subject.......how do we price our work.

I'll try to explain my thinking - which Alan claims is a total mystery!!!! 

Happy potting folks.