Preview Pictures Up!

Bottles By Alex

In anticipation of the sale this coming weekend here at the Hewitt Pottery there are a few preview pictures up on Marks website. Click the above picture to be directed to the preview page. It was a terrific firing and we were all very pleased with the results. We have also had tremendous help the past few day with all the cleaning and preparation for the sale. Ill get some pictures of the crew tomorrow. The preview is Friday night so if you are in the area stop on by and say hello.

Romertopf Chicken Part 1...

This is my mother's time tested clay pot chicken recipe. If I do say so myself, over the past six months I think I have finally come to a place of near perfection with this dish. I have modified the recipe slightly from the original, adding just one or two extra steps. My roommates brought this little broiler back from the farmers market but one day soon I hope to have (along with a kiln of my own) and nice little flock of broilers to fill the old Romertopf with every Sunday night.

An important note on clay pots: Earthenware clay pots like the one pictured above must be soaked in water for 30 minutes before being placed in a cold oven. This is essential for most pottery that is being cooked with, unless it is flameware.....but I don't know anything about flameware.

To start you will need:

• 1 - 3-4 lb chicken brined for 12 to 18 hours.

To prepare the brine dissolve 1 cup of kosher salt and 1/2 cup of sugar into a gallon of water. I usually heat up one cup of water on the stove and add the salt and sugar to that to help it dissolve.

• Roasting vegetables (I like to use some combination of the following: beets, potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, leaks, garlic cloves..etc) Cut into large chunks like pictured above.
• Olive oil
• 1/2 to 3/4 stick of butter
• Optional: Thyme, dijon mustard, white wine
  

Once the chicken is removed from the brine dry and truss it with butcher string. Both of these steps are in my opinion essential. The brining helps to both flavor of the meat and more importantly aiding in the meats ability to hold moisture. I have found that a brined chicken is more moist and tender than one right out of the fridge. Trussing the bird helps it to cook evenly. Click here for a tutorial on how to truss a chicken.

Now skin what vegetables need to be skinned and cut them into large chunks. I then put them in a large bowl and dress them with olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Then take a second large bowl and put it on top of the first and toss it all around to ensure and good and even coating of the oil, salt, and pepper.

Now you can rub onto the skin of the chicken whatever you like. Tonight I did just dijon mustard, salt, and pepper but thyme is also very nice. Take a handful of vegetables and throw them in the bottom of the clay pot and place the chicken on top of them. Add the rest of the vegetables around the bird. Cut the butter into table spoon sized chunks and put it ontop of the bird. You may also add a glug or two of white wine at this time.

Put on the lid and place in a cold oven. Turn the oven to 450, set a timer for 1 1/2 hours and clean up (or read some blogs).

When the chicken is done I think it should register somewhere around 150 but someone feel free to correct me if that is wrong. After and hour and a half I then take the lid off and broil the bird for a few extra minutes to crisp of the skin and the top layer of vegetables.

I like to serve this with short grain brown rice and a large simple salad. There will be a lot of cooking juices at the bottom of the pan which should be spooned over everything. This is actually, despite my long winded rambling, a very simple dish to prepare. Enjoy...

O'Keefe Pottery

This past weekend I helped Lara O'Keefe fire her kiln, along with Julie Jones, Joseph Sands, and husband Jimmy. Jimmy and I did the overnight and then the other help arrived in the morning. This is a great little kiln that Will Ruggles designed and it fired beautifully. Below are a few pictures from the firing. From peaking through the door and side ports it looked like there was a great load of pots in there. Hat's off to Lara for making it all happen...

New Blogs...

I have come across two new pottery related blogs in the last few days. The first is that of Andrew Stephenson who makes woodfired stoneware in the Asheville area and is also a former Jones Pottery apprentice. Check out Andrew's blog and see what he is up to....

The second new blog was started by fellow potter Josh Copus to lead up to and document his and Eric Knoche's newest project called the Carolina Kiln Build. In a matter of weeks the two plan to head up a kiln building extravaganza on Josh's land in Madison county, just north of Asheville. This event is limited in the number of participants so sign up now!

Midnight Shift Confessional #2

Its been about a year since I sat in front of Matt’s kiln and wrote my first Midnight Shift Confessional. Now I am in front of a different kiln, although similar in many aspects. It too is large and lumbers along, consuming effortlessly 5 or 6 large slabs of pine per stoke. The pyrometer reads 1989 as we slowly climb through reduction.

Since being at Marks I’ve done this shift every firing and its just dawning on me that I won’t always get to do this. When it is my kiln that shift will probably be given to someone else, so I will be rested in the morning to lead the firing to completion. Suddenly that day does not seem so far off and as it approaches I am again thinking about shadows.

This time it is not the shadow of family but instead the shadows of those who have taught me. Its not going to be an easy road and the ruts that they have worn are deep and comfortable, which I will gladly follow for a time, my work showing clearly the influence of those who have taught as well as all of the influences of their respective pasts. Eventually though, I suspect the road will become less worn, and those ruts will fade into tracks which in turn will become just a faint trail which I can follow for a time and then veer off away but know that it is always there to return to.

That is what we get from an apprenticeship, a guide and a standard. Something to go forward with us into the world as we make our work, something to nudge us along towards excellence. For almost three years I have tried to perfect some one else's vision of perfection, to chase after the forms of their own tormented search. The problem with this is that you never get there. It’s the carrot on the stick and I will never be satisfied until I stop seeking that approval and instead grant it to myself.

Countdown...

The past few days were spent getting the last few pots in, bricking up the doors, and moving wood to the respective piles that Mark likes to have distributed around the kiln. Tomorrow I will go in for a shift from 10 until 2 and then go home for the afternoon only to return at midnight for the late night shift which those of you who have followed the blog since it's inception know that I enjoy.

My morning commute, out the front door, down the driveway and then an immediate left down the gravel under the pecans. The pottery can be seen in the background.





We started loading the middle of last week. Tomorrow we will finish up the last stack in the very front of the kiln and start the pre-heat. Thursday I will do the overnight shift and Friday we will finish up. I'll bring the camera tomorrow and snap a few pictures of the stacks. For now I am too tired to say anything more than it's been a long few weeks and it will be great to get this thing fired off. This cycle we fired twice in the time that we would normally just fire one kiln. In preperation for the Hickory show we fired Mark's new kiln and then turned around an tried to make a few pots to fill the salt kiln in preparation for the spring sale.

"My Favorite Things..."

This is the talk the Mark presented at the Catawba Valley Pottery and Antique Festival this past weekend. It is well worth the read....

A Few of My Favorite Things about North Carolina Pottery

By

Mark Hewitt

Regional pottery traditions are extremely rare; they are like wild flowers that only grows in certain special soils and microclimates. A unique set of economic, historic, and cultural conditions have allowed the pottery tradition of the Catawba Valley to survive from the early 19^th century until now. It is miraculous that alkaline-glazed pottery is still being made here in the western Piedmont, and similarly miraculous that salt-glazed pottery is still being made in the Eastern Piedmont. The pottery culture of North Carolina is better developed than in any other state in America. Of course I know that pots are made elsewhere, they say that pots are made in Oklahoma and even Tennessee, no doubt in South Dakota, but no other state in the US has such a rich ceramic heritage as North Carolina, and I’m going to discuss a few of the conditions that have allowed North Carolina to flourish as a place to make pots.

These are “A Few of My Favorite Things About North Carolina Pottery”

* Well, it all starts with the materials. For those of us who enjoy the primal poetry of gathering local materials (an increasingly rare endeavor as the convenience of Big Clay dominates our psyches and supplies), North Carolina is rich in ceramic materials; we have good deposits of clay, any number of interesting glaze materials, and abundant wood. My apprenticeship with Michael Cardew in England showed me, among other things, the luxurious qualities of pots made with materials that potters gather locally and refine themselves.

When I first visited Burlon Craig, in 1981, I went straight to his clay pile. When visiting potteries, some people go straight to the showroom, others go straight to the kilns, I go to clay piles. I remember standing on top of his clay pile knowing, or somehow sensing, the spirit of the earth, recognizing that the foundation of his pottery was sound, that his clay came from right there, close by, that his pots honored his place, they were part of it. My teacher, Michael Cardew, wrote that, “A good potter cannot treat his raw materials merely as a means of production; he treats them as they deserve to b treated, with love. He cannot make things merely as utensils; he makes them as they have a right to be, as things with a life of their own.”

Rather like stories of native peoples crawling on their knees the last few yards to sacred outcrops of hematite, or white clay, with which they adorn themselves, so too do I become I ecstatic when I go to Lemon Springs, near Cameron, about 30 miles from my pottery, where at the bottom of a sand and gravel pit, I get good clay for my pots. Though I confess that I succumb to the ease of ordering special materials from ceramic supply companies, it always feels, by contrast, as though I’m getting the ceramic equivalent of overly-processed junk food.

We all know the difference in taste between a home-grown tomato and one raised in a greenhouse far away and sent in February to our local Piggly Wiggly. Well, the same applies to the flavor of pots made from local materials. One of the greatest underlying pleasures of ceramic appreciation comes from our response to material quality. A pot is a record of a material process. You pick up a pot, you feel it, you look at it, and at some level, you know it.

There is interest these days in the concept of “food miles,” or how far away was the food on your table grown, who grew it, and how much energy was consumed to get it from its source to you? This “locatarian” sensibility can be extrapolated to all the objects in your house, your furniture, your appliances, even your entertainment, and for us potters, to the materials that comprise our clay bodies and glazes. Where and under what conditions was that cobalt or copper mined? Where did the clay in those plastic bags orignate? How far has that that nephylene syenite traveled?

Alkaline-glazed pots, and salt-glazed pots, are among the simplest to make - which does not, however, make them easy to make! In the case of salt-glazed pots all you need is clay, a wheel (in fact, not even a wheel), a kiln, and a little salt. In the case of alkaline glazed pots all you need are clay, a wheel, a kiln, some wood ash, and a simple glass frit. Keeping things simple is very difficult, but if you do mine and refine materials locally, the flavor of that place and region is recorded in the pots you make, and, to me, the pots are healthier. The greens of South Carolina and Catawba Valley glazes are luminous, they have unfathomable depth and complexity. The clay quality underlying the salt glaze on Eastern Piedmont ware is an intricate organic quilt, patterning the surface with unending pleasure.

In addition to these finely-tuned assessments of ceramic quality, economics is involved in the material equation too. For instance, as recently as the early 1980’s, Burlon Craig spent a mere $15 to produce a large groundhog kiln load of pots. This was spent on gas for his pick-up to transport clay from old Rhodes clay holes near the Catawba River, and go haul wood from a nearby saw mill. In a similar vein, my most recent 20 ton truckload of Lemon Springs clay cost me a gallon pitcher and a gallon jar, including delivery.

* My next favorite thing about North Carolina pottery is skill. I’d like to read a quote from a member of one the other branches of the Southern pottery tradition, taking the liberty of crossing state lines and let Gracie Hewell, the wife of Harold Hewell, owner of Hewell’s pottery in Gillsville, Georgia, talk about her skills. They make horticultural ware, which is often perceived as being at the very bottom of the hierarchy of ceramic practice. The Hewell’s specialize in making strawberry pots, flowerpots, beehives, and clay jack o’lanterns, their pots are ubiquitous in garden centers throughout the southeastern United States. Gracie Hewell was being interviewed in 1981 by Charles Mack, a folklore professor at University of South Carolina, and quoted in his book, “Talking with the Turners; Conversations with Southern Folk Potters.”

Charles R. Mack. How long have you been turning?

Gracie Hewell. Let’s see, I got married in 1950, and I’ve been making pots ever since 1952

CRM. Did you just decide that you wanted to do it, or did your husband ask you to do it?

GWH. No, he didn’t ask me to do it. I just always said that, when I got married, whatever my husband done that was what I was going to do, whether he was a mechanic or a farmer or whatever, and he happened to be a potter, so I decided I wanted to make pottery.

CRM. Some people have said that women haven’t done any turning. They may work around the shop a little bit, but they never do any turning. What do you think about that?

GWH Well, I think women are missing out on the best part of the deal….cause, see what I do, I make a lot of pots and I finish pots for my son, Chester, my husband, Harold, every day, and for my brother in law, Carl. I finish pots for them every day – every pot they turn and when somebody is on vacation, I finish off pots for Henry and his son. I finished off 1,700 pots Monday, putting holes in them – strawberry jars – and turned 210 pieces myself.

CRM. How do you like doing it?

GWH. I love it. I’d have to like it as much as I do it. I made 735 pots in one day and done a lot of finishing, so one day I’m gonna break a record, one day when I haven’t got a lot of finishing to do. I’ve been making 400 of these this morning, and then I’ll have all the strawberries of Chester, Harold.

CRM. Are these the tops for the pumpkins?

GWH. Jack o’lanterns. I’ll be turning 400 of these, and then this evening I’ll finish every one of these strawberries…

CRM. Do you do this everyday?

GWH. Every day. I even do all my housework, gardening, the yard, flowers. I do everything. I don’t have no help. Don’t want none.

CRM. It must sit pretty well with you.

GWH. It does. I enjoy it. There’s a customer that comes here that said I never have done a day’s work in my life. He said I liked it too good: it wasn’t work.

What Gracie Hewell does daily is echoed by Black Mountain College poet Jonathan Williams, who said that one of the tasks of art is, “To raise "the common" to grace; to pay close attention to the earthy.” Gracie knows grace, just as surely as anyone else. Her strawberry pots help people raise strawberries out of the earth, they are placed on a porch, by a pathway, or in a garden, and tended carefully until you are able to pick a ripe, juicy berry as you pass by on a clear May day. That is grace.

Or, another echo from Charles Olson, another Black Mountain poet, “These days / whatever you have to say, leave / the roots on, let them / dangle // And the dirt // Just to make clear / Where they come from.”

Gracie Hewell is a rural minimalist; her production resembles a Steve Reich or Philip Glass composition, a dense tapestry of minor variations, an intricate, loving, daily ebb and flow.

Gracie Hewell’s love of repetitive work is echoed across North Carolina, particularly in the workshops of the old guard folk potters, now sadly reduced in number, but including Neolia and Celia Cole, daughters of A. R. Cole, working in Sanford, who inscribe the bottoms of their pots with poems, homilies, and love notes, and whose mugs still cost $4, and Boyd and Nancy Owens, children of M. L. Owens, who make standard North Carolina domestic ware, simple, straightforward, inexpensive. Jugtown Pottery can also be considered part of this group.

All these potters learned their art, their craft, from family members, they did not go to art school, they went to work, learning as they went. Their motives for making pots may have been more financial than aesthetic, but not necessarily. Their range of expression is narrow, but their constraints do not preclude love, experimentation, imagination and change. On a trip through the south in 1981 with my wife, Carol, I remember watching Chester Hewell throw 10 gallon strawberry pots out of the sloppiest, coarsest clay I’ve ever seen, and, as he was making one, he looked up at me with a twinkle in his eye, and said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ cruder, have you?” At that moment he might just as well have been Peter Voulkos making an Abstract Expressionist ceramic scupture. In fact if I close my eyes and think of the big stacks that Voulkos made, with their slashes and holes, I picture them as strawberry pots!

I’ve already mentioned Gracie Hewell and the pride she clearly has in her work. Whether or not you feel that she is engaged in the drudgery of factory work, or that she could be replaced by a Southeast-Asian press mold operator, she displays the passion, discipline, and skill common to all great artistic endeavors. Production potters like Gracie Hewell, and countless others throughout the South, have been invaluable models for me. I may not make as many pots, but I am quick, and can make a good variety of thinly-potted small pots, and generous big pots, with consistency and pride. I love every one, and my skills stand me in good stead in the marketplace, in fact they are vital.

* The next item on my list of Favorite Things about North Carolina pottery is style. Clearly making pottery is about more than technique and repetition. It matters what you make. Excessive quantity works to the detriment of quality, and quality is always the standard to which potters must be drawn. However, combine quantity and quality with innovation (whatever the schools of pottery you belong to), and you will most likely make work that is affordable and appreciated.

In North Carolina our library of style is large. In addition to our emblematic “roots” traditions, we also have Penland, and Black Mountain College. And I’ll talk about them later.

As a member of the Cardew-ian branch of the Leach School, the style of the older pots from the “roots” tradition vibrate with what my eye has been trained to see. In the case of the South Carolina alkaline-glaze tradition, the pots combine European vernacular forms with Asian ash and celadon glazes, and also have an African-American inflection in both making and decorating. South Carolina pots have a lot of style. So too do traditional Catawba Valley alkaline-glazed pots.

The North Carolina salt-glaze tradition combines European and New England forms with the cross-draught groundhog kilns that produce surfaces corresponding to those on Japanese anagama style wares. Together, these Southern pots have an underlying friendly soulfulness, and are, to me, as significant a cultural expression as the Blues, or bluegrass music.

By grafting these pottery “roots” traditions together with what I learned as an apprentice in England I produce wares that have a regional aesthetic as well as a contemporary sensibility. My Iced Tea Ceremony Vessels, for instance, combine a tongue-in-cheek regional counterpoint to the Japanese Tea Ceremony with contemporary ceramic references. They are fun to look at, think about, and to use. Sometimes I like my pots to be spare and minimal, sometimes I like them to be elaborately ornamented. I am not root-bound, but choose to use these healthy Carolinian roots as the rootstock for my own hybrid growth.

Tradition can be new if its parameters are understood to be liberating, not confining, and if it is treated with imagination. It belongs now, just as much as the avant-garde belongs now. The one does not cancel out the other. One person’s creativity is not at the expense of someone else’s; individual creativity does not invalidate anyone else’s creativity.

Joseph Albers, the German émigré who taught at Black Mountain College for many years, objected to tradition only if it had moved from a “role of facilitation to one of inhibition.” Tradition is not inhibiting if I decide to make 150 traditionally-inspired, alkaline-glazed mugs in a day, (not nearly as many as Gracie Hewell might make), endowing each one with all my attention, deliberately choosing to be restrained, allowing a single, pure note to be heard in each. Every one is an idea, and every one is a reality. Every one is a momentary bloom, with tradition facilitating the contemporary expression of a venerable root of American ceramic practice.

The title of my talk, “A Few of My Favorite Things about North Carolina Pottery,” comes, as you know, from the Rogers and Hammerstein song in the “Sound of Music.” You may also know the version of that song performed by the great jazz saxophone player, John Coltrane, who was born in Hamlet, North Carolina. He took a wonderful song and made something new out of it that is now, itself, a classic. Many contemporary North Carolina potters continue to do the same thing, taking a classic, and making it their own.

But NC has more than just a “roots” tradition. We also claim the progressive, experimental, Black Mountain College, and its many distinguished alumni, including ceramic artists Robert Turner and Karen Karnes, as part of the rich tapestry of North Carolina’s diversified ceramic heritage.

And, of course, we have Penland, and can only marvel at how it has fostered so many excellent craftspeople over the years, and how it has added an exciting range of new styles to contemporary North Carolina pottery. Indeed one of the tasks facing traditional North Carolina potters is figuring out how to absorb contemporary studio pottery practice without losing the essence of what has gone before.

It is all too easy to box ourselves into camps of potters, to be a “traditional North Carolina potter,” or be a “Penland potter,” or to favor the experimental legacy of Black Mountain pottery, to the exclusion of all else. How do we reconcile these differences? A recent documentary about Black Mountain College entitled, “Fully Awake,” points to a way forward. It is not difficult for potters to be “fully awake” to what is around them, gracefully acknowledging, if not necessarily embracing, all the varied approaches to pottery making. Let the words Black Mountain alumni, composer John Cage, guide us, “The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”

Indeed I see the emergence of a new kind of melting pot, for some of my favorite contemporary North Carolina pots are being made at the place where Penland, Black Mountain and traditional NC pottery intersect. This nexus of experimentation can perhaps be summarized by a quote from Josef Albers, when he said, “To experiment is at first more valuable than to produce; free play in the beginning develops courage.”

* My next favorite thing about North Carolina pottery is the potters, of course. I would like to have known Daniel Seagle, his son James Franklin, Isaac Lefevers, The Hartzogs, Chester Webster, J.A. Craven, and all the other Cravens, Nicholas and Himer Fox, and Solomon Loy and Tom Boggs, and so many others. Their pots are so good, it is tempting to think that they were pretty interesting characters too. They all should, in my opinion, be given equal billing to Adelaide Alsop Robineau, Fergus Binns, and George Orr, when writing histories of American Ceramics. However, these “country cousins” seem to irritate or embarrass art critics, and more often than not, it is the better-connected, urbane, and eccentric who end up in the national anthologies. Nonetheless the work of the great nineteenth century NC potters has been celebrated and continues to be venerated for its fundamental aesthetic majesty.

Thanks to the remarkable transition from utilitarian to art ware pottery, the list of twentieth century potters is also long and distinguished, including Ben Owen, J.B. Cole, A.R.Cole, the Reinhardts, Burlon Craig, Bachelder, the Aumans, and so many more.

Today you can wander the halls of this festival and enjoy contemporary North Carolina potters as much as their pots. This direct connection between maker and customer is at the heart of North Carolina’s “Mud Love.”

* Another favorite thing about North Carolina is the market. North Carolina is not the only place with a reputation for being a good place to sell pots, but there are clear regional discrepancies throughout the US in terms of potters’ abilities to sell their ware locally. The market in North Carolina is strong partly as a result of the specific cultural history of North Carolina relating to its ceramic heritage, and partly because of the continued clustering of potters in Seagrove in the eastern Piedmont, the Catawba Valley in the western Piedmont, and up around Penland in the Mountains. These pods of potters provide an enhanced cumulative identity and a numerical economic advantage - like theaters on Broadway, or golf courses in Pinehurst, the more the merrier (wouldn’t that be nice in the case of Seagrove!). The healthy market is also as a function of the deliberate efforts of the State and a series of individuals who, in various capacities, actively promote pottery, in all its manifestations, through exhibitions, publications, conferences, schools, collector’s guilds, and craft fairs.

Many of these advocates are able to float conceptually between traditional pottery made in Seagrove and the Catawba Valley, and contemporary work being made at Penland and elsewhere, without being ashamed of either, giving each aesthetic its days in the sun. They are equally happy in the company of ceramic sculptors like Michael Sherrill, whose sculptural work commands tens of thousands of dollars, as in the company of their “country cousins,” like the fabulous seventy-year-old Cole sisters and their $4 mugs. A threshold of cultural acceptance has been crossed in North Carolina, and potters are well-received within the community at large, and are accorded a status that is more main stream than marginal.

Of course, the healthy market is also a function of the healthy economy of the state (at least it was healthy up until last week…), not to mention the quality of pots being made here in North Carolina, and the confident entrepreneurial skills of many individual potters, who readily adapt to ever-changing marketing tools and conditions. For instance, many contemporary North Carolina potters are active bloggers, several potters are now on Facebook, and a few are even active Twitter-ers.

All the talk, all the buzz about North Carolina pottery, is rooted in the tradition, and has extended along its many branches. Black Mountain poet, Harry Duncan, puts it nicely when he said, “We have come so far that all the old stories whisper once more.” The tradition whispers once more, but it wouldn’t get far with only a whisper. Without people talking, or sometimes even shouting, about North Carolina pottery, what we see today here at the Catawba Valley Pottery and Antiques Festival would not be happening.

* And so the last, but by no means least, of my Favorite Things about North Carolina Pottery is the advocacy performed by countless people across the state and elsewhere who have, over the years, boosted the profile of North Carolina pottery - talking it up, spreading the word. It is if as though there is an unofficial Public Relations committee that has promoted NC pottery ever since the Busbeee’s began talking about Jugtown and Seagrove area pottery back in the 1920’s - and it probably started well before then.

I’d like to honor all the people who have helped promote North Carolina pottery, all the pottery advocates, who have been, and still are, responsible for putting on festivals, organizing guilds, sitting on pottery related boards, writing books, catalogues, newsletters, and press releases about NC pottery, organizing exhibitions and auctions, giving talks to civic organizations, teaching at all different levels, volunteering to distribute fliers around the state, volunteering for all the thankless little tasks that keep the wheels turning. The entity, the phenomenon we know of as “North Carolina pottery,” would be shadow of what it is today without all these people.

We potters benefit more from your advocacy than you’ll ever know, so, from the bottom of our collective hearts, thank you!