Visitors to the studio can see a shelf full of teapots that have failed to please me, but I was really pleased with these when they came out of Joy Brown’s wood kiln last summer. Black shino glaze with a wax resist over the trusty Lehman clay and fired for nine days right in front until everything melted into what you see here.
Wood firing is my favorite thing and I’ve been doing more of it this year. I make pots out of stoneware, my friend Mark Rowntree and I have a new clay body we mix ourselves, and the pots go in the kiln largely unglazed. There’s Mark’s little kiln in Philmont, which fires in just over two days, and then every year we go fire Joy Brown’s big anagama in Connecticut with all our other friends. The pots from this kiln are my favorite, the longer I look at them the better I like them. They’re a little more expensive, but oh so worth it.
