My Second Studio

Why I Do What I Do: A Little More History

          For a little over a year and a half, I made pottery in my one car garage studio, adapting the space over time to make it more efficient, but I quickly outgrew that space.  Knowing my need for more workspace, a friend alerted me to an ad he saw about pottery equipment for sale.  The equipment came with an option to rent the warehouse where it was located.  The warehouse was a mile or so south of downtown. 

The man selling the pottery equipment was an attorney who had never reconciled himself to practicing law and instead had fallen in love with making pottery.  His pottery affair did not last long. He set up a business making planters but soon decided that practicing law was more lucrative than making planters and he thought there was much less wear and tear on your body practicing law.

I had more space but the conditions weren’t great.

           He accepted my offer on his equipment and I moved out of my one-car garage studio and into the 3000 sq. ft. warehouse.  His kiln was inside the warehouse, which had no heat.  That worked well during the winter months but the kiln increased the heat in an already hot warehouse during summer.  It was an understatement to say that working conditions were not optimal, but then I have never had heat or air conditioning in any of my studios.

A Family Affair:

My second son rolled around the warehouse in a roundabout helping himself to buckets of slop clay when his mother lost sight of him.  His first sentence was “That light hot,” which came from his mother and I warning him about the burners when the kiln was firing.  My oldest son played with the next-door neighbor children and rode his tricycle around the warehouse.

          Having to drive back and forth to the warehouse made our lives more complicated and fueled a desire to have our house and studio in the same location.   Within a year, we started looking for another place with enough land to build a studio.

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