Owing mostly I think to the many hours I spent as a teen in my mother’s pottery studio and to a lesser degree, that summer when I worked a fork lift and a pug mill for long defunct J-Clay,  pottery to me is a sort of comfort food in the realm of making.  Oddly, (at least to me), when I was younger and would have had unfettered and subsidized access to all the paraphernalia, I never really had any interest.  I guess I just needed to get a little separation from that weird young adult orientation that says “My mom does that.  It’s not for me”.

In the mid-nineties, I lived in the Seward Park neighborhood of Seattle.  The Seward Park Art Studio  was quite close and I must have walked past the entrance a couple of hundred times without going in (that’s not for me).  And then, one day, having a vaguely nostalgic feeling for my mom’s studio, I finally stepped in;  and of course,  it felt just like home.  So, I took a few classes and eventually signed up as a member potter and made/sold more than a few pots.  Not enough to make a living but almost enough to pay for all the pots I was making.  That’s somewhat novel to me;  a making activity that pulls it’s own weight.

Unfortunately for my clay activities, but to the huge benefit of my son,  around 1999 we moved from Seward Park to Ballard so that my son David could attend Ballard High.  It turned out that Ballard was just a little too far away to make studio membership work.  Still, in the years since, I have occasionally signed up for a class there to get some wheel time and satisfy that “comfort food like” hankering.  It’s also nice to reconnect with some of the long term denizens of the studio.

As for this blog, I expect that for the most part, this area will contain pictures of current pots I think are worth documenting plus a few pictures of past work that I liked enough to take pictures of.   First photos to come soon.

[as an aside: Mom’s still at it.  The studio has changed but she’s still making pots and doing who knows how many shows a year.  Here’s a link to her website: Barker-Meyer Clay Studios]