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July 2011 Newsletter
Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter
In this Issue
1. Indigo Street Pottery Calendar
2. Jeff in the Studio
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3.Jeff Reich, Desert Erratic
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4.Japanese Beer Tumblers
5. Amy Yao
6. Indigo Street Pottery Landscape Notes
7. Indigo Street Pottery Garden Notes
Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!
August 13, 2011: 2011 Annual Art Auction, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado www.andersonranch.org
February 25 & 26, 2012: Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramic Research Center 11th Annual Ceramic Studio Tour asuartmuseum.asu.edu/ceramicsresearchcenter
May 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/
1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar
2 Jeff in the Studio
3 Jeff Reich, Desert Erratic
6 Landscape Note
Our Leucophyllum candidum (common names: cenizo, violet silverleaf), native to the Chihuahaun deserts of Texas and Mexico, is in full bloom this time of year!
7 Garden Note
4 Japanese Beer Tumblers
Here are some of the Tlacalula Pink Heirloom tomatoes in our garden this summer. These pleated Aztec tomatoes come from the Tlacalula area of Oaxaca, Mexico, believed to be the botanical birthplace of all tomatoes and have been grown for a very, very long time. Fruits are pear shaped, deeply ruffled, and usually with splotched and cracked shoulders. Inside is a deeper pink flesh, very juicy with plenty of seeds. We got young starts of this interesting tomato from our expert gardening authors and friends Mary and Gary Irish.
Welcome to the kitchen garden here at Indigo Street Pottery!
Having a cat in the studio is definitely new for us here at Indigo Street Pottery this year! In these photos Jeff is glazing a new sculpture. After sketching his surface design onto the bisqueware with pencil, he applies various color fields, employing both wax and tape resist to get crisp glaze edges and color juxtapositions. Jeff scratches desert botanical imagery into some of the raw glaze areas before waxing over them.
Top photo: Jeff removing tape in his sequence of tape, glaze, wax... tape, glaze wax, ...etc. with Maurice the cat especially interested in the tape removal step!
Bottom left photo: Removing blue painter’s tape from an area that has been glazed and then waxed, revealing a crisp edge. The (green) wax protects that area of glaze from the next glaze color that will be applied.
Bottom right: Jeff working and Maurice taking it all in.
Jeff Reich, Erratic, glazed stoneware sculpture, welded steel base, 65” h, 2010
Jeff has done a series of Desert Erratic pieces that reference the boulder deposits called glacial erratics left by scouring glaciers thousands of years ago in his home state of Michigan. Geologists define erratics as stones or boulders that have been carried from their place of origin by a glacier and then left stranded by melting ice on bedrock of a different composition.
From the initial energetic growth of the Agave weberi’s enormous flowerstalk, to it’s full height of over 25 feet, and now, with the inevitable death of the plant at this point in its life cycle, it has been toppled by a stiff wind. Various wildlife, such as gilded flickers and other nectar eaters, are still visiting the flowers of the fallen behemoth. Surrounding the dying original parent plant are several young reproductive offsets, called “pups”. It has been quite a show this summer!
Amy Yao is an artist we have come to know this year. Her home is in New York’s Chinatown, but while here in Arizona she has been taking some pottery classes at the Mesa Arts Center with Jeff. Amy has shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art’s PS1, as well as being recently reviewed of as one of the top ten young artists in New York to watch. Links:
Amy Yao, Entry/Exit
Amy Yao, In the Red
5 Amy Yao
Our artist friend Amy Yao, from New York, went to Japan recently and saw these great, unglazed, high-fired beer tumblers at a restaurant in the upscale Ginza area of Tokyo. The place setting with beer (farthest to the right) was in a place called Robota. She thought we’d like the images and she was right! Very nice. Some of Amy’s artwork is pictured in the story below.