2022 wrapped (pottery) - Why Am I Making This? Issue #30
Hello hello hello.
Last newsletter of the year. It sure has been a year. Your faithful letter-writer is Julien Coyne, an artist, potter, photographer, etc based in southern Maine... a few of you out there are new letter recipients! Welcome & I hugely appreciate your interest in my work. You first-time readers probably discovered my work at the 2022 Portland Pottery holiday sale, which I wrote about last time. Here's a few photos of my shelf all set up at the beginning...
And here it is at the end! I'm really happy with how the sale went. To everyone who bought something: Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I am very nearly out of energy for doing anything in 2022 (but I am hopeful about a fresh start next year...) but I really wanted to send out something fun to wrap everything up. I actually wrote most of a long look-back over not just the past year, but my whole art life from 2016 or so, but I decided I was too embarrassed about how saccharine it was to send it out. If you'd be interested in reading it anyway, let me know and maybe I'll try to publish it in some form for you to read later.
Instead, I'm just going to send a bunch of photos of pottery I have made over this whole year. Long-time readers might remember some of them. I did a bad job documenting my pottery this year, so a lot of these photos are phone snapshots. Maybe I'll do better next time!
This year has felt... interesting, but when I think back over all the pottery I made, I'm amazed at how much I have learned and grown. Almost everything on my sale shelf above was made in 2022 (!) and represents a lot of experimentation and learning. There are also a lot of pots I made that aren't there, either because I sold them elsewhere or gave them away as gifts. Anyway, let's start the recap...
In 2021 I only used white stoneware, and I finished up a few of those pieces at the beginning of 2022.
Then, I decided I wanted to branch out into darker clay bodies, and started using some super dark clay with carved porcelain slip over it, or sometimes porcelain slip as a canvas.
I loved how these came out and wanted to try out using porcelain slip on red stoneware as well. (And also experiment generally with different glazes.)
I also tried making pinched mug forms in black clay for the first time.
I struggled to find time to photograph everything consistently - I made a set of 6 mugs which I loved and found homes in different places, but I never took a good photo of all of them together. (Instead, have some bad photos of them all together.)
Empowered by my first set of mugs, I made another group of 8 mugs in white stoneware. (They do not match at all, which is fine. I also truly didn't take a photo of these ones together all finished in any way!)
I did raku for the first time!
Around this time in the year - maybe June or so - my energy for most things started declining. I feel like I didn't make a lot of pottery, but that's not true at all. I kept experimenting - I used slabs and plaster molds for the first time, made more pinched mugs, made slab-and-pinched trays, and tried lots and lots of different glaze combinations.
At the end of the year I tried out "drawing" (underglaze inlay) on porcelain and white stoneware, which stunned me.
I didn't make anything consistently this year, and there's not a clear narrative to my pottery learning - but I made a lot of work and learned a lot. Proud of myself and hopeful about next year. I'll leave you with a few things in progress that will be finished in 2023.
I may take January and February off from this newsletter, so it might be a little longer than usual before you hear from me - but hopefully I'll have more fun things to show you then.
Until next time,
Julien
PS. If you bought anything of mine in the sale - I would love to see it in its new home!