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#174 How To Make High Quality Wheel Thrown Pottery w/Tanner Gerstberger
39 Plays3 years ago
What is up Shaping Nation on this episode of Shaping Your Pottery I got to interview Tanner Gerstberger. Tanner makes some amazing high quality pottery by throwing on the wheel. You can learn more about Tanner by checking out his Instagram @dr.t_pottery
Top 3 Value Bombs:
- How to make high quality wheel thrown pottery
- Tanners best tips for throwing larger pots
- Building confidence by making what you want to make
and so much more
Take this Free Quiz to see how close you are to finding your pottery voice click here to take the quiz shapingyourpottery.com/quiz
Follow me on Instagram @nictorres_pottery
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Transcript
Introduction and Finding Your Unique Voice
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, real quick before we get started and get into the episode. If you want to figure out how close you are to discovering your own unique voice, I put together a free little quiz for you to see how close you are to finding your own unique voice. If you would like to take this quiz, go to shapingyourpottery.com forward slash quiz or you can just go to shapingyourpottery.com and it'll be right there. I'll see you guys in there.
00:00:26
Speaker
If you love pottery and want to take your skills to the next level, you're in the right place. Find your own pottery style right here on Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. Let's get started.
Interview with Tanner Gerstberger: Techniques and Philosophies
00:00:39
Speaker
What is up, Shaping Nation? This is Nick Torres here, and on this episode of Shaping Your Pottery, I got to interview Tanner Gerstberger. Tanner makes some really incredible, high-quality, wheel-prone pottery.
00:00:51
Speaker
In this episode, you'll learn how Tanner makes this high quality wheel thrown pottery. You'll learn also Tanner's best tips to help you throw better high quality work and throw larger pottery as well. You'll also learn about why you should be failing as much as you can in order to find your voice. And finally, you'll learn about building confidence with work by making what you want to make. I hope you guys enjoy this episode and I'll see you guys in there.
Tanner's Journey: From Construction to Pottery
00:01:21
Speaker
Tanner, welcome to Shaping Your Pottery and share with me what is something people might not know about you. So something people might not know about me is that I went to college to CSU to study construction management and was planning on pursuing that as my full-time job since
00:01:42
Speaker
I thought pottery might be infeasible at my current moment. And so I was planning on doing that, got a degree, got a full time offer, and then eventually turned it down to try and pursue pottery and then worked as a chef for seven months full time while pursuing pottery. And then now I am doing pottery full time. That is awesome.
00:02:07
Speaker
So tell me a story how you got started with ceramics. Yeah. So I first got started in ceramics when I was roughly eight years old. I didn't really know what pottery was, but or ceramics was. And so I like always did little summer classes at this high school named Barstool. And one of the classes wasn't
00:02:33
Speaker
art class that was ceramics and we did hand building and got to glaze our pieces. And I just really fell in love with working with clay and all that came along with all the possibilities that can come out of just clay in general. And then after that, I took more art classes in middle school. And that was the first time I actually got onto the pottery wheel and then eventually continued on in high school.
00:03:02
Speaker
Absolutely love
Apprenticeship Insights and Business Skills
00:03:03
Speaker
it. So you had the great opportunity to apprentice under Danny Meisinger. I hope I said that right. Tell me the story how this came to be. Yes. So my junior year of high school, one of my good friends, Sam Meisinger, his dad, Danny Meisinger, I found out to be was an actual full time potter. And so once I found that out, I told my mom about it and she was like, oh, you should go try an apprentice for him. Like, that would be awesome over the summer. And I was like, yeah, that would be sweet if I could
00:03:32
Speaker
throw pots and get better and so my mom called him up asked if we could set up a meeting with him and so we did and then I went over to talk to him about apprenticing and I was super excited and so we agreed on apprenticing that summer so I would
00:03:54
Speaker
I would do chores for him in exchange for real time and knowledge gained from him and so it would be anything from preparing hundreds of pounds of clay in different quantities. It would be cleaning out the pug mill, cleaning the studio, taking apart one of his own old kilns and so with
00:04:20
Speaker
With all of that came a newfound knowledge of pottery, which I had never experienced before because I had only had my high school knowledge and what I had learned from YouTube. And so I started to learn from one of the best, in my opinion, Danny Mysinger. And it was a whole new game because I could throw exponentially better after learning from him. And so I spent two summers
00:04:48
Speaker
in total with Danny learning and apprenticing under him. So you contribute your growth as an artist to this experience. How did this help you with growing as an artist? Yeah, so it really helped me in the fact that it really gave me the opportunity to see kind of what an artist thinks about when they are starting a new work. Something that Danny always said is keep the end in mind.
00:05:17
Speaker
as in you don't really want to or when you start you want to have the end goal in mind as in if you're going for a specific form you want to keep in mind the texture that's going to be on that form and how that relates to the glaze that you're going to put on to that form and how it relates to
00:05:38
Speaker
how that piece is going to look overall and feel overall and the size and complexity of it. And so that was a huge thing that really helped me grow as an artist as well as
00:05:50
Speaker
logistics behind becoming an artist that was a huge thing because when I first met Danny the very first thing he ever said to me was you don't want to become a potter and that crushed me at the moment because I just met him and he was living like basically the life that I wanted to live and I was like what why don't I want to become a potter like
00:06:13
Speaker
you're doing it and I want to do what you're doing and so the reason being is because it's very expensive especially all the overhead costs of becoming a potter which I came to learn about because wheels are super expensive as well as
00:06:29
Speaker
a pug mill, slab rolling tables, all the glazed materials, just everything really adds up so it's very very expensive to actually feasibly do it and then let alone sell work too because you might need 4,000 mugs sold in a year just to break even on
00:06:50
Speaker
all of your expenses. And so he really made me understand the logistics behind how hard it is to become a potter. And so I think that was the biggest thing that helped me grow as an artist. So how did the logistics part actually help you with growing as an artist? Yeah, so it made me understand that I did not want to be, I guess,
00:07:18
Speaker
exactly like he was and the fact that Danny produces a lot, a lot of work, a lot of really high quality work. There is, you need to sell all that work to make a profit. And so I've always had a different approach to pottery as in, in high school, I didn't
00:07:40
Speaker
get the teaching that I guess wanted exactly. Like my teacher was kind of hands off like learn and fail, learn and fail, learn and fail. He would show us a demonstration and then we would like just be fighting for ourselves. And then when I met Danny, he taught me how to do everything so well and it was just night and day difference. And so I've always wanted to
00:08:02
Speaker
more so going to the side of teaching pottery because that's where I've always wanted help in pottery and felt like I can contribute the most to other people with teaching pottery and so I've always thought that I can go a different route and teach classes and gain money that way other than selling my work and then maybe one day once
00:08:26
Speaker
I get enough credibility and what have you that I can also sell my work like he does. But I want to mainly focus on the logistic sides of teaching people just because I want to give the knowledge that Danny gave me to others.
00:08:46
Speaker
I definitely agree with that because I feel like I'm also the same way where I want to teach what I know to help other potters. And then one day I will be able to sell my pottery. I agree with that a hundred percent. So let's talk about your pottery. In a short sentence, can you tell me what you make? So. So I specialize in creating high quality wheel thrown pottery.
00:09:11
Speaker
love that short and simple. That was a very great explanation of that. So tell me the story how you decided to make your high quality wheel thrown pottery. Yeah, so I've always wanted to kind of push the limits of what I thought I could do on the wheel.
Creating High-Quality Pottery: Goals and Inspirations
00:09:25
Speaker
And so that obviously comes with many, many failures. And with that,
00:09:32
Speaker
in high school my teacher gave us a lot of room to kind of do whatever we wanted and kind of experiment and so with that experimentation came me kind of finding out figuring out what I kind of liked and then once I figured out kind of what I liked I then went to Danny where I then figured out how to do it more efficiently and much
00:09:58
Speaker
much better in general and quicker and everything surrounding that. And so he really showed me how to make art that is not only decorative and really nice looking, but also it's very functional, functionable. I'll take a sip of water. And so he taught me how to make really
00:10:26
Speaker
really detailed and clean work that not only I would appreciate, but the maker or the consumer would appreciate. Like something that a lot of potters look at when assessing other people's pottery is they look at the bottoms of their pots and see how their foot is, see how smooth it is, check their signature, their maker's mark and all of that.
00:10:55
Speaker
that those things really helped me define kind of
00:11:02
Speaker
the area that I wanted to go in with my pottery, as well as when I got back into pottery, I felt the most creative I've ever felt when doing pottery because I had the past knowledge of learning from Danny and in high school, but I hadn't been doing pottery for so long that I just started sketching ideas in a book and now I have hundreds of sketches that I can't wait to one day try when I get the time, so.
00:11:31
Speaker
I love that. Shaping Nation, it's important to make for yourself but also make for other people. You want your pottery to look good for other people as well as well for yourself. I love that so much. So you are inspired by your parents. How has this helped you with your pottery and your pottery journey? Yeah, so the biggest thing is growing up,
00:11:53
Speaker
Growing up, I've always seen how hard they worked to provide for me and my siblings. And so I've always wanted to put that amount of effort into something that I loved as well.
00:12:06
Speaker
I just wasn't feeling that amount of love towards construction management. And I finally realized that pottery was what I should be putting all of my attention to. Even if it is a slow grind upwards, I'll still be happier and it'll be better for my mental health in the long run. And I didn't want to regret looking back on my early 20s and saying, oh, I could have done pottery or
00:12:34
Speaker
I could have started earlier and so I chose now to start because I had least liabilities that I will ever have probably and so that's one thing and then the other thing is that my parents taught me how to run a business or has helped me learn how to run a business. Like I'm still learning obviously so it's definitely a big learning curve with all the paperwork and
00:13:02
Speaker
filings that you need to get done to have a, I guess, sustainable business. And so with their leadership has really helped me in that fact. I love that. So what advice would you give to someone looking to make higher quality pots? And also what advice would you give to help them make larger pots as well? Yeah, so the first thing I would say is
00:13:29
Speaker
is to really understand the basics of wheel throwing and really get a solid foundation because if you don't have a solid foundation then you're going to be going into trying to make bigger and better pots.
00:13:46
Speaker
with just inadequate experience. For example, in high school, I would always try and make bigger pots and my high school teacher would sometimes get pretty annoyed with me because he would end up having to recycle all the clay that I went through in a day.
00:14:03
Speaker
And so when I learned from Danny, he really taught me the basics again of, or I mean, almost for the first time, basically taught me the basics just because I developed a lot of bad habits from basically learning by myself and through YouTube, where I didn't have somebody like right in front of me teaching me hands on what to do.
00:14:28
Speaker
I would say first thing is really understand the basics and then the second thing is to basically fail as many times as you can and just never give up because it will get really really frustrating and you'll want to quit but that's when you need to keep going and
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah. And then obviously just keep trying to increase your skill level and keep testing the boundaries of how far you can go. Like the most clay that I've ever thrown with, I think is 30 pounds. And that was just a few months ago where I was just like, Oh, I want to, I want to give this a try. And so it was something I'd never done. And so it's always good to keep experimenting.
00:15:16
Speaker
I love that. Shape mediation to recap a little bit. So number one is to focus on getting the basics down. Number two is to really just start trying to improve your pottery a little bit at a time. Keep on going, keep on going. And then
Overcoming Branding Challenges and Building Confidence
00:15:34
Speaker
three, keep pushing yourself as well. Keep pushing your pottery to that next level. So let's talk about discovering your voice.
00:15:42
Speaker
What would you say was your biggest obstacle when it came to discovering your voice? Yeah, so the biggest obstacle in discovering my own voice was definitely the fact that I just never started and the reason I never started was because I was always overthinking
00:16:01
Speaker
the name that i wanted for my pottery channel when i was apprenticing under danny i'd always wanted to start in instagram and record myself and show the failures and show the successes but i was always too in my head about what name i was going to have for my pottery and so i never ended up starting and so
00:16:21
Speaker
When I came back to pottery four years later, yeah, four or five years later, my senior year of college, I did not want that to hinder me again because I was really loving pottery again. And I was like, okay, this time I'm going to start a channel. I'm going
00:16:37
Speaker
to really do this no matter what and so i was like i'll just do gershberger pottery which is my last name and then pottery and see how that goes and so i started doing that and very quickly i was
00:16:53
Speaker
starting to overthink it and second-guess myself and thinking that it was a bit of a mouthful, pretty hard to remember, pretty hard to spell. And so I was like, what if I go with a sophomore in college nickname that I had received, which was Dr. T, that basically stood for just me being able to help people whenever they're in need. And so
00:17:19
Speaker
I changed it to Dr. T and that was very one relieving because I because people really really liked it and thought it just rolled off the tongue nicely and also it helped me establish my brand because my sophomore year of college my older brother came up to
00:17:39
Speaker
party with us and he noticed that people were calling me Dr. T and so he told my parents about it and then that Christmas they got me a Dr. T neon sign and so I didn't have a use for it up until my senior year where I decided to switch my name to Dr. T and then that just became like a symbol for my art and so
00:18:01
Speaker
Once I had that symbol established and that brand established, it gave me a lot of freedom to really just focus on my craft and my content to really further my voice and develop the confidence that I had in my own pottery. I love that because you are all about like helping other potters grow and like that is your brand. I love that and that is your voice. So something that I love that you do is
00:18:28
Speaker
Everything that you make is pretty much what you enjoy making. Can you tell me how this has helped you with discovering your voice?
00:18:35
Speaker
Yeah, so the reason why I do it so that way I enjoy making it is because that helps me build up confidence in the fact that I am always happy with the work that I am putting out. And so nobody will ever be able to take that away from me or bring me down in the fact that they might think it's awful or if they think it's great.
00:19:06
Speaker
do care a little bit, but not so much in the fact that it's going to stop me in any way from creating what I want to create. And also almost everything's subjective in life. And so one person could think it's awesome. Another person could think it's awesome. It really matters what you think is awesome. And that should be the determining factor of what really pushes your voice.
00:19:34
Speaker
Absolutely agree.
Inspiring Community and Improving Quality
00:19:35
Speaker
Shaping Nation, the most important thing is whether you are making something that you truly enjoy, not for somebody else, but what you truly enjoy. That is your voice. I love that so much. What is something you are doing to evolve your voice even further? Yeah, so I'm constantly trying to increase the quality of the work that I am making as well as the content. This is because I really want to
00:20:02
Speaker
basically bring more people to the ceramics and pottery industry because it's such an awesome way to express yourself and really just have a good time in whatever you're doing.
00:20:18
Speaker
I want to basically become more confident, become a better public speaker and really build on growing my audience and building a community that really supports others and supports other potters and ceramicists and really just keep trying to enhance my own work.
00:20:42
Speaker
I love that. So as we're coming to a close here, what advice would you give to someone trying to discover their own unique voice with their pottery? Yeah, so I would first say that the biggest thing is make sure that you're passionate about whatever you're doing, because if you are not passionate about it,
00:21:01
Speaker
You will go in headstrong, but then you'll hit some bumps in the road and then you'll kind of. Waver off and then you might just forget about it. And so if you're passionate about it, it's not going to feel like work. It's going to feel like an endless journey that you're continuously.
00:21:22
Speaker
trying to overcome and find solutions for and so the next thing is just experimenting once you're passionate because you don't know what you like until you know that you don't like stuff and so I find that experimenting with stuff is a great way to really broaden your horizons and further seek out what you really like and so
00:21:49
Speaker
Just always be searching for new things and that will help you discover your own voice. Absolutely. Shaping this, you have to be passionate about what's working and keep on experimenting. Keep on finding these things that you truly like to make.
Where to Find Tanner's Work
00:22:04
Speaker
Tanner, it was so great channel today. Where can my audience go and learn more about you? So they can go on my Instagram at Dr. T Pottery or my website, www.drtpottery.com. And yeah, it was great talking to you as well.
00:22:26
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. Do you have questions about pottery that you'd like Nick to answer? Send them to us on Instagram at Nick Torres underscore pottery. We'll see you next time.