Happy birthday!

Oasis FineArt and Crafts at 103 South Main Street, Harrisonburg, VA, has a different Featured Artist exhibit nearly every month. April focuses on that phenomenon we all know so well: birthdays. I didn’t have much time, but I made a few simple plates to play with the theme.

Birthdays mean so many different things to people. We all know some to whom a birthday is, they claim, “just a number.” To someone else it may be a day of joyful anticipation, although in the predominant American culture that stance is probably popular only among the very young or radically different. Birthdays terrorize some, so they deny them with either outright lies or by helping plastic surgeons send their kids to ivy league schools. They never get away with that for very long, but at maybe it’s the race against time that counts. Other people let birthdays turn them into ossified old fossils, grumpy and disheartened, while others just as old decide to appreciate the time they have and work at staying chipper. My friend Evelyn acknowledges that she has “a hitch in my get-along” (that’s an octogenarian “get-along”), but she refuses to let it get her down when she can be out in her garden or visiting with her family or pets.

Whenever your birthday is, whatever mass of numbers you may have accrued, may it be happy! Take time to celebrate you and every one of those years that you’ve had to grow and do whatever you enjoy doing!

Those Lovely Great Big Leaves!

I was working at OASIS Fine Art & Craft in Harrisonburg last week when Brenda Fairweather (of Hot Flash Pottery and D’vine Baskets fame) walked in with a long tubular newspaper roll in her arms. She presented it to me with a flourish and there they were-- a whole collection of huge rhubarb leaves. It’s the rhubarb stems we eat; the leaves are allegedly poisonous. I’ve never been tempted to eat them, for sure, but I know what to do with them on the clay! What a thoughtful gift! 

Having spent my youth alternating hot summer days between weeding a vegetable garden and throwing heavy hay bales onto a wagon, as an adult I have been steadfastly committed to avoiding such toil. Lo and behold, Bill gets stationed in Germany and we discover that our 1830s house has a designated plot in the community garden. Once I learned that my neighbors didn’t think Americans know how to make gardens, of course I had to prove them wrong. But back in the US, I quickly reverted to my delightful get-our-veggies-at-the-farmers’-market strategy and planted flowers. 

Then we moved to West Virginia where there seems to be no end of space and I could not help designing a few containers for perennial eatables. Bill built them—sturdy and ready. Two for asparagus (someday I’ll tell you that story), one for gooseberries (because the name makes me want to sing limericks and reminds me of some old friends of my mother’s), and a big one for rhubarb. This turned out to be an exercise in patience because only the berries can be used the first year. The pencil-thin asparagus and flourishing rhubarb plants need to grow for one more year, after which I am promised they will be plump and hearty. Knowing  how hard it is for me ignore those huge rhubarb leaves waving in the breeze back there and looking like they would love to shape and decorate pots, Brenda arrived with her cylinder of leaves! Now that’s a real gift!

 

The World Beyond My Studio

As we begin to prepare for the 2015 season at Lost RiverArtisans’ Co-op and I continue to haul Kahoka pots to OASIS in Harrisonburg, I think it is time to say a bit about other galleries in which my pots are available. In each place there is someone special who values and sells them, for which I am very appreciative! 

My handbuilt stoneware has been available for many years at Riverview Gallery in historic Havre de Grace, Maryland. There Tam Sticker, an incredibly talented artist herself, runs a gallery in the lobby of an old building that houses numerous other businesses. True to the area, the gallery comes complete with wallpaper borders of duck decoys, which are a staple in Havre de Grace. Riverview is at 224 North Washington Street. You can learn all about it at www.riverviewgallerymd.net. In the amazing visuals on that website, you will see Kahoka pots in every image! It is an intriguing town and well worth a visit where the Susquehanna River meets the Chesapeake Bay. Spring IS coming! Give it some thought!

Another fascinating Mid-Atlantic setting for my pottery is the Michael B. Tusing Gallery in Staunton, Virginia. The Frame Shop is in the lower floor of the old mansion; the gallery is on the second floor. Michael is described as a “dealer of refined and eclectic sensibility,” which is perfect! When he first proposed some years ago that I sell Kahoka pots at his gallery and I laid eyes on that delightful Victorian dwelling, I had my doubts! Kahoka pots are rustic, if anything ever was, and the Tusing Gallery would thrill my grandmother’s dazzling Victorian sense of style. But Michael loves eclectic and he surely knows how to make it work! The gallery is at 21 North Market Street, just below Mary Baldwin College.  Check it out at www.tusinggallery.com and give yourself a day exploring another wonderful historic setting.

I feel privileged that the artists at Riverview Gallery and the Michael B. Tusing Gallery welcome my pottery from way back in a hollow deep in the West Virginia hills. I love being in each of these galleries, and I know you would too!