Today I bring you a great interview and artwork from Denise and Paul over at MorrisPottery. A married couple who both play in clay all day without killing each other, imagine that!
Even though they may be joined at the hip for business, they answered all questions as individuals, well at least until Paul went to bed and left Denise to type up all the answers, lol.
Q - 1. Tell me a bit about yourself.
Paul:
I was raised in a suburb of Detroit MI. I started playing with clay when I was about nine years old. I dug clay from woods behind my house and made all kinds of things on our picnic table. In retrospect, I know I was experiencing the buzz of creativity, and of finding a medium with which to express myself. At 15 I started to learn to use the wheel, and at 19 moved to Minnesota to work in pottery. I've worked in a lot of places since then.
Since 1983 Denise and I have lived here at our place 60 miles north of Minneapolis. We work mostly with wood firing and salt glaze using clay slips and glaze to paint our pots.
We raise quite a bit of our own food, have 2 dogs a cat, some reptiles and birds our daughter left us to take care of while she's at school. We have always made pots together for the last 27 years so we have spent more time together than most married couples.
Denise:
I too was enamored with tactile
activities at a very young age. My first clay was a play dough my mom
made out of flour salt and water. I went to seven different schools and
lived in 6 different towns in Minnesota. When I was three credits short
of my Art BA I left school to go work as a hand builder and studio help
in a production pottery. In 1990 I finally finished my degree.
I met Paul at that first job, and like he said we have been working together ever since.
Q - 2. How do you decide what to make? What is your thought process or inspiration?
Paul:
Over the years we have covered a lot of ground and have used many different techniques. These days I mostly concentrate on creating surfaces that lend themselves to our images. Functional pottery has been the main focus for along time, but lately I've realized there are a lot of things I'm not so interested in and have pared down the variety of forms I make to focus more on the painting aspects. New ideas often develop slowly at evolutionary speed, other times suddenly, like a mutation, due to an observation of nature or a new use of a brush or tool. Nature and animals are my main influences.
Denise:
The functional pots that I collaborate with Paul on are my most spontaneous. I love using the slip trailer, a syringe-like tool, in my case. I'll experiment with any animal ,fish or plant, but I never get tired of doing the horses. My sculptures have always been a part of my repertoire, as well as tile and slab work. Rabbits, horses goats, pigs, chickens are all subjects I have worked with. When I depict any animal or person, I want to show a flash of life. Like you just caught sight of the rabbit,and the next instant he will hop off.
Q - 3. What is usually going on in your studio while you are working? Such as do you blast music, have silence, or watch soap operas?
Paul:
My studio is usually a mess, Local radio going "songs from the best times of your life", dog scratching at the door.
Denise:
My studio is sometimes up at the house where I made my most recent six sculptures. I do venture down to our shop once a day to check for pots that need work, and I have added an electric kiln so I am sorting out years worth of sculptures and getting them glazed and finished. I like working at the house in the winter where I can pop in on the computer and work on my website,photo shooting/editing Etsy listing, customer care,promotion, and packing and shipping. I like TV and usually have it on.
We have our booth set up in our living room and it makes it easy to organize the pots and inventory them.
Q - 4. Where else can we find you on the web or in brick and mortar?
Denise:
Our website www.paulmorrispottery.com and MorrisPottery.etsy.com
Our work is in Sivertson's Galleries in Duluth and Grand Marais
Q - 5. What are your favorite websites to visit?
Paul:
Never Do. (yes, the man says never, I only fell on the floor for a moment)
Denise:
I like blogs from other potters on the Etsy Mud Team. I also like to mostly lurk on the Pottery Glass and Porcelain board on Ebay, but sometimes I help identify pots. I also learn a lot about old pottery and glass there. I like looking at the hatcheries this time of year and seeing all the colorful poultry.
Q - 6. What is your favorite color?
Paul: Green
Denise: Green
Q - 7. What is your sign? Yeah, yeah,sorry, I know a lot of horoscope junkies.
Paul: Cancer
Denise: Scorpio
Q - 8. Now can you share an embarrassing moment, or at least tell us a good joke? We all do need a bit of humor ya know.
Denise:
Well now Paul went to bed, and he's the funny one! Maybe I'll just say that we do laugh a lot. A sense of humor is so important when two people work so closely for so many years.
Paul: See his answer for #9
Q - 9. Last but not least - If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have 4 things, what would they be?
Denise:
If stranded I would want reams of paper, pencils, a really long book, coffee
Paul: (yes, I spelled desert as dessert again!)
If I was stuck on a Dessert island I would want a blueberry peach pie, a pan of brownies, a pistachio ice cream cone, tin roof sundae.
Thank you so much to both Denise and Paul! Below is just a few items from their great shop! So go check out their amazing pottery over at MorrisPottery, heart them or go buy yourself something or a gift for a loved one!
