Flawed

After the Spring Show at the Berkeley Potters Guild I received this email from my friend Olivia (with whom I had traded a little teapot for one of her wonderfully textured covered jars):

Dear Josie,
The other day I was looking at your teapot and enjoying so much all the details....the blue inside the spout, the fine lip of the spout, the blue inside the pot...the three holes from the body to the spout....whoops....uh-oh....the holes are plugged! Oh dear, can't pour. I'm so disappointed. I have to be more careful when I shop about function being as important as your lovely form. I do love it, but, what to do?
Love, Olivia

In my haste to get my show set up I neglected to test this teapot to see if it actually poured. Thank god this was a trade with my friend and not some irate customer. Still it's pretty embarrassing and teaches me to be much more careful. Could somebody please tell me... WHEN IS IT GOING TO GET ANY EASIER? Seems like you just get one thing under control and another bites you in the butt!

NYC Art Attack

Back from a great trip to NYC. John and I spent all day Saturday wandering around Chelsea streets in the candy store of art galleries...saw so much beautiful work. Here are three of our favorites but there was SO MUCH MORE worth seeing and savoring:


Philip Knoll at the Morgan Lehman Gallery. His graphic paintings were just wonderfully charming, funny and inspired.

Andy Goldsworthy's White Walls at the Galerie LeLong. I am a big fan of Andy Goldsworthy's work and this didn't disapoint. We didn't get to see or hear the porcelain falling as most of it had happened last week but the inpact of the patterns this piece has created both on the walls and on the floor was profoundly great.


Eva and Adele at the Claire Oliver Gallery. These two self proclaimed "Hermaphordite Twins from the Future" were there at the gallery and look exactly like the image of their heart shaped faces in their paintings. Their pieces were so vibrant and have such movement....loved them.

Nothing like a massive art attack to inspire me.

First Anniversary

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my right knee. We celebrated by walking to the local tapas bar, Cesar, and having an incredible meal of paella , salad with smoked trout, arugula, grapefruit and avocado and of course lots of yummy wine. Walking the 4 or 5 blocks to get to the resteraunt last year was an impossibility for me. Now I feel like the happiest camper in the world. Here's a toast to who ever invented and perfected the artificial knee...BRAVO...you changed my life.

One other thing I did yesterday was buy CUTE, comfortable new shoes (almost as cute as these hairy ones) so I could walk all over NYC this weekend. Then this morning I came across this web site Virtual Shoe Mueseum on Designer's Block UK. YIKEES...be sure to watch the video...pretty amazing. I'll bet the dancers will need not only new knees but new ankles in the near future and the choreographer looks like such a sweet little lady. I'm off to New York to visit my beautiful daughter and her great boyfriend, have dinner with my darling godson, go see art, get inspired and to glory in the fact that I can now walk miles on the concrete streets.

P.S. Don't you hate it when you get all dressed up and ready to leave the house and you get tooth paste on your boob?

Ready to Pack it Up

Last show at the Berkeley Potters Guild is over. Now it's time for me to pack it up and get ready to move. YEAH! I've learned so much from being at this 36 year old institution but boy, am I ready to have my own studio - to have light, fresh air, no more crazy making meetings and best of all control over the direction I can go with the space. I am excited about the possibility of having a little gallery to show not only the work of the studio but of other emerging artists and to finding three studio mates who share in the vision of working in and creating a new lively work space.

The contractor started on Friday taking out the old carpeting revealing lots of yellow swirly glue stuck to the concrete.Today the big sanders are coming and hopefully that will do the trick. Tomorrow the plumber arrives to install the new sink. Last but definately not least comes the electrician. His initial bid was astronomically expensive ($44,000) so I went to plan B and am going to work off the power that's available. I had hoped to have power for 4 kilns but will only be able to have 2, maybe 3 (if we fire at night , stagger firings and keep the lights off). My friend Diana always told my children "Sharing is Caring". After a little bit of paint I think I will be able to move the first of June

Is it Art or Crap?

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Is it Art or Crap?

The Good Stuff

Last weekend started the 2 weekend Spring Show and Seconds Sale at the Berkeley Potters Guild. I got everything set up in the nice sunny hallway instead of my dark, cave-like studio and it looked great. I put all the "bad" stuff on one side of the hall and all the pretty first quality work on the other. Then I waited for the hoards of art lovers to arrive. Arrive they did - bargain hunters heading straight for the seconds. I sold every single flawed piece I could dig out of my closet that was priced under $10! The only bargains left were the "good" seconds, the ones that are only slightly mangled, priced over the magic $10. I guess I have no shame as to what I will sell... Is my my professional integrity lacking? I do take the hammer to the worst of it but $5 here and $10 there (sing to Old Mac Donald Had a Farm) adds up. I was thrilled to get rid of it all. It always amazes me what people will buy including plates that turned into flat Frisbees and vases where half the glaze is chipped off. Really, every piece starts off with the most optimistic of intent looking really good then bad things happen on the way into or out of the oven! I like to think that people see the true inner beauty of the piece, either that or believe in giving the truly ugly a home.

Hopefully this coming weekend, now that most of the seconds are gone, people will start looking at the "good" stuff.