Peter Laird pottery at FCBD

    As readers of my blogs and Facebook page may be aware, back in 2012 I reunited with a long lost love -- making pottery! I'd done it for one semester in college a little over forty years ago, and then for some reason or set of reasons never put my hands on the clay again until I started taking lessons and classes with Tiffany Hilton, a local "practical potter", as she refers to herself. (Don't let that somewhat modest description fool you -- she's incredibly skilled and a wonderful teacher.)

    I haven't been drawing much in recent years, and the pottery has been a great creative outlet for me. I've enjoyed it immensely. Some friends and family members have dropped hints since I got back into doing ceramics that they wouldn't mind having a piece or two. That's flattering, and I have let one or two pots go, but I have to confess that I am kind of stingy with them -- I want to keep them all!

    But I decided that for Free Comic Book Day this year at Steve Lavigne's "Shellback Artworks" store in Wells, Maine on Saturday, May 7, I would donate a couple of pots for a raffle. One of them is from that first year -- 2012 -- that I got back into pottery, and the other one is from my most recent class in 2016.

    The piece from 2012 is a kind of goblet, although one more suited to eating something like fruit salad or ice cream than having a drink from. The goblet form was one I had a lot of fun making in that long-ago class in college, and I had to try my hand at it again in TIffany's studio. On this particular piece, I also used some rolling-bead texturing tools I'd made to add some funky textures.
    This one measures about five inches tall and five and a quarter inches wide at the top.


    The second pot I will be bringing to Shellback is this bowl from the most recent class I took in 2016. It measures about three inches high and six inches wide at the top. 

     This was one of a few bowls I used one of TIffany's newest glazes on, a yellow glaze which also has some cool light brown elements in it. This bowl would be well-suited to eating soup or a small salad from. (The quarter in the lower left of the photo is for scale.) 



     Here's a top view of this bowl which shows the slash of olive green glaze I used to decorate the inside.

    TMNT fans might be interested to know that in signing each piece before they were fired, I included with my signature a small Turtle head sketch, as seen in this example below.

    I'm not sure how Steve is planning to run the raffle, but I expect the rules will be made clear on Free Comic Book Day. -- PL