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October 2011 Newsletter

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

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

May of 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

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July 2014 Newsletter

Archived Newsletters

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

2. Making Complex Work in the Arid Desert Summer

3. Jeff Reich Exhibition Interwoven at Kean University, New Jersey

4. 50 from 6: Ceramics Invitational at Southern Utah University

5. Our Recent Trip to Michigan

6. Indigo Street Pottery Kitchen Garden and Landscape

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!

Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

50 from 6: Ceramics Invitational at Southern Utah University

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Drying Complex Work in the Arid Desert Summer

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Farraday Newsome, Darkness is a Garden, glazed terra cotta teapot, 9 x 12.5 x 9”, 2013

May 15 - August 24, 2014: Jeff Reich, Nancy Dryfoos Gallery, Kean University Galleries, Kean University, Union, New Jersey http://www.kean.edu/~gallery/

August 1- 30, 2014: Third Annual Five15 to the Fifth, Gallery Five15, Phoenix, Arizona

September 25 - November 8, 2014 : 50 From 6: Contemporary Ceramic Art From Six Rocky Mountain States, Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah https://www.suu.edu/pva/artgallery/

November 7 - 9, opening November 6, 2014: 21st Annual SOFA Chicago, Farraday Newsome represented by Katie Gingrass Gallery http://www.gingrassgallery.com http://www.sofaexpo.com

May 16 - July 5, 2015: Farraday Newsome, Clay Art Center, Port Chester, New York

http://www.clayartcenter.org/default.asp

Jeff Reich, Interwoven, glazed stoneware, 18 x 17 x 14”, 2012

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Jeff standing next to a spring-blooming agave in our back yard that is most likely native to the region. Many of the agaves we’ve grown have bloomed during the winter and their flower stalks sometimes freeze before the flowers can even open, indicating that they are probably native to a frost- free region.

A detail shot of the radicchio (Italian Red Treviso heirloom) flowering while going to seed. We were surprised by how pretty and aster-like the lavender flowers are.

Our summer garden is a mix of older but still productive (or going to seed for seed saving) winter vegetables such as kale, radicchio, lettuce, and collards mixed in with summer vegetables such as the tomatoes (rear, left), eggplants and peppers.

Farraday has finished the wet clay construction on three new teapots. Since it’s summer in the low Sonoran Desert and temperatures over 100F every day and humidity at about 8%, the drying needs to be carefully controlled and slowed. Our studio is air-conditioned, but somewhat inadequately, and air-conditioning itself has a drying effect! Clay shrinks when it dries, so complex pieces like these teapots need to dry slowly and evenly to prevent thinner and more exposed parts (like the leaves and the handles) from drying faster than the rest and thereby cracking away.

To control the drying, Farraday first covers the three teapots with absorbent, 100% cotton muslin. The fabric wicks moisture from the clay and surrounding atmosphere once everything is covered with plastic.

The cotton-covered teapots are covered with thin plastic. Farraday takes the plastic off once a day and replaces the fabric, which becomes quite damp, with dry fabric. The pieces are never allowed to air dry, except for the minute needed to change out the fabric. The humidity under the plastic tent stays high and even, so all of the parts, whether thick or thin, dry at very nearly the same rate.

Jeff Reich Show “Interwoven” at Kean University, New Jersey through Summer 2014

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Indigo Street Pottery Kitchen Garden

Jeff Reich currently has a solo exhibition in the Nancy Dryfoos Gallery, Kean University Art Galleries, Kean University, New Jersey from May 15 through August 24, 2014. The show, entitled Interwoven, consists of ten wall-hanging sculptures, including a triptych, and four standing sculptures. Jeff’s work is stoneware, glazed and fired to cone ten in a reducing gas kiln.

http://www.kean.edu/~gallery/Upcoming.html

Reich states,

The clay sculptures I create are inspired by natural formations, such as boulders fallen upon each other, or a tree’s erratic growth during drought. Geometric forms allude to the manmade. Leaning forms conjure images of tentative balance.

My glaze compositions consist of two-dimensional fields superimposed on the three-dimensional surface of the clay. Windows of glaze drawings bring glimpses of repetitive plant forms. Thorny, sometimes leafless plants, like Allthorn, adorn the surface by means of glaze sgraffitto. Textural glazes invoke thoughts of clay cracking on dry river beds. Black reminds me of night when the desert is cooler.

I grew up in Michigan surrounded by water. Later, when I moved to Arizona, I was surrounded by mountains. My choice of colors, glazes and form convey my interpretation of nature's presence around us.

Farraday Newsome and Jeff Reich are included in the upcoming invitational exhibition 50 from 6: Contemporary Ceramic Art from Six Rocky Mountain States. The show was curated by Southern Utah University’s Professor Susan Harris and Assistant Professor Russell Wrankle for the Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah. A full catalog will be published.

The show runs September 25 - November 8, 2014. https://www.suu.edu/pva/artgallery/index.html

Our Recent Trip to Michigan

Jeff Reich, right element of wall-hanging triptych Desert Emergence, glazed stoneware, 17 x 15 x 9”, 2014

Jalapeno peppers ripening to red. We’ll smoke them with mesquite chips to make dried chipotles.

The vegetable and fruit tree enclosure. Burrowing animals are kept out by a 3” thick x 18” deep subterranean concrete barrier with a few holes for the irrigation lines.

It’s peach season in our kitchen garden! The organic garden is enclosed by a 20’ x 30’ x 9’ high cage that screens out birds, squirrels, rabbits, cats and dogs with 1/2” aviary wire. The structure is made of Trex lumber, a durable product made of recycled plastic and sawdust waste. Since Trex doesn’t rot, dry out, or crack like regular wood, it doesn’t need paint or pesticide (for termites). We have twelve fruit trees, various berries, herbs and vegetables growing in our garden. Everything grows in compost-enriched, drip-irrigated, heavily mulched desert soil.

White trilliums blooming in a birch forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during our recent visit.

While we were in the Upper Peninsula we stopped at a graveyard with a sign Old Indian Cemetery at the gate. It was in Chippewa/Ojibwe country. Most of the grave markers were spirit houses made of wood, each with a small hole near the eave for spirit travel.

We went to Michigan to celebrate Jeff’s father’s 90th birthday. Here are two “selfies” Jeff snapped.

Left photo, left to right: Jeff, his brother Doug, Doug’s wife Jody, and Jeff’s father Stan.

Right photo, left to right in rows from top to bottom:

top row - Farraday, Doug, Jody, Jeff’s mother Marilynn, Jeff.

middle row - Jeff’s niece Megan, Jeff’s sister Susan.

bottom row - Jeff’s grandnephew Cooper, Jeff’s niece Vanessa.

During our visit we took some time to drive up to Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula, traveling through Hiawatha National Forest to Michigan’s wild northern coast on Lake Superior.

Left: 50-foot highTahquamenon Falls, where the water is perpetually orange-brown from wood tannins.

Right: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, with the Miners Castle sandstone formation at the upper edge of the cove.

Left: Farraday is beckoning you to take the North Country National Scenic Trail!

Middle: Lake Huron was nice swimming! It was much warmer than Lake Superior, which reportedly still had ice in places.

Right: Jeff ran a 10K race that benefited the LIvonia Save our Youth Foundation. He won a first place medal in his age group with a time of 46:42. Jeff’s parents, both 90, still live in the Livonia, Michigan home where Jeff and his siblings were raised.