5” high fire clay stoneware pot, temmoku glaze, ca. 1973

homemade temmoku oak ash glaze with iron furring

temmoku glaze, iron furring, ash/rutile glaze inside

Since almost none of my clay pieces from this period survived, and I have no archived photos, this is a placeholder. I made a lot of pots, platters, bowls, teapots, and raku sculptures during my three years at College of Marin with Thano Johnson, who was a student of Sōji Hamada. We apprenticed from the ground up, finding and digging clay, refining it, finding the right cone temperature to fire it, measuring shrinkage, to mixing glazes, they had to be the right kind for the type of clay body—to making our own glazes from scratch—I made my own oak ash glazes from our iron fireplace. We had raku parties at Waddell Beach with the famous potters. I have one mask that survived.