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#66 Understanding Crystalline Glazes w/ Andy Boswell
42 Plays3 years ago
On this episode of Shaping Your Pottery we got to interview Andy Boswell. Andy makes pottery Using Crystalline Glazes which are absolutely incredible.
Top 3 Value bombs:
1. How create effects with your Crystalline Glazes
2. Being More efficient with your pottery
3. Focusing on 1 thing at a time
and so much more.
Follow Andy on Instagram @kaolintiger
Listen to more episodes here https://www.shapingyourpottery.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everybody, it is Nick Torres here. And in this episode I got to interview Andy Boswell. Andy makes so many incredible crystalline glazes. In this episode you will learn how to make these crystalline glazes and get those crazy effects. You will also learn about sharing your knowledge of pottery and why that's important. And finally, of course, you will also learn about discovering your own unique stuff.
00:00:28
Speaker
Andy, welcome to Shaping Your Pottery and share with me one thing you believe potters should be doing to be successful in pottery. So I think this is a great question and the first thing that comes to mind is just that, you know, I think for any artist or entrepreneur and as a potter you kind of have to be both. You really want to try to find something that you can do that's unique. There's going to be a lot of situations where
00:00:56
Speaker
You know, you look at your work and you look at other people's work and you view them as competitors. And unfortunately, you're not only going to be doing this with other potters, you're going to be doing it with basically anything that anyone else can spend their money on. And so what you really want to do is try to make it so that you are doing something that is truly unique, because that way you can try to act a little bit more like a monopoly.
00:01:23
Speaker
And while I'm not encouraging anyone to try to price gouge their customers, I think it is really important when you're trying to make it so that your business is successful that you have
00:01:37
Speaker
you know, enough of a profit margin to be able to invest in new equipment and grow your business and things like that. And typically, when I see a lot of artists, not just potters, you know, there's that starving artists cliché. And a big reason for that, I think, is because they don't have enough of a profit margin built into their business model.
00:02:01
Speaker
And I think the best way to do that is to try to make it so that you are doing something that is truly unique. That is some amazing
Importance of Uniqueness in Pottery
00:02:09
Speaker
advice. We're going to have a really great show today. We're going to talk about crystalline glazes. We're going to talk about sharing your pottery knowledge. And we're also going to talk about finding your own voice. So now, Andy, share with me how your father impacted you into becoming a pottery today.
00:02:26
Speaker
So the relationship I have with my dad is actually kind of a funny story. My dad is a potter. And as a really, really little kid, I just wanted to be like my dad. So I thought working with Clay was cool. He's got some good photos of me as a toddler playing with Clay. But then as I got a little bit older, when I got later into grade school, when I was in high school,
00:02:51
Speaker
I definitely had the idea that I wanted to do something else that was more a typical business. The idea of having a normal 9 to 5 seemed attractive to my high school self and having a job where you had like a 401k and a little bit more financial security all seemed like things that were really, really important.
00:03:16
Speaker
But after I finished my first year of college, I started to get a better sense of what my professional life would be in a more standard situation. And I started to look at my dad's life as something that was really, really attractive. You know, he got to make his own hours, he got to choose his own projects. He could really direct his life in the way that he wanted to.
00:03:39
Speaker
with a level of freedom that you don't really get to have unless you are self-employed. And it's even more so when you're a self-employed artist because you can do things that are a little bit more commercial. You can do things that are a little bit more like fine arty. There's a pretty wide range of things that you can do as a self-employed artist.
00:04:00
Speaker
And that was really, really attractive to me. And so I switched majors. I was going to RIT. It just so happened that they had a really good ceramics program. So I really lucked out there. And during those years, my college professors definitely had the biggest influence on me. But after I finished college, I really reconnected with my dad in the way that he works because
00:04:25
Speaker
You know, fresh out of college, there's not a whole lot of jobs to get as a potter unless you're going to go straight into grad school. And I really wanted to get to work. And so, you know, I was fortunate enough to be able to, you know, just kind of
00:04:42
Speaker
work out of my dad's studio, which was pretty big at the time. He basically has a big three-story barn. So the first floor was for teaching classes. The second floor was his studio. And the third floor, he rented out to, I think at the time when I finished school, there were three other potters that were renting space on that top floor.
00:05:04
Speaker
And then I came back, started renting one of them, and then just slowly took over. So my dad's definitely been a really big influence. And he's definitely helped me out with a lot of things. But it's also a little bit tricky, because even though he is a successful potter, a lot of other potters are
Lessons from Andy's Father
00:05:28
Speaker
bit more focused on the traditional way of doing things and they're a little bit more focused on you know what worked for them back in like the 80s and 90s and you know some of those things don't work out so well anymore. So one of the things that he's been really influential on is just having a lot of value or
00:05:54
Speaker
Encouraging me to put a lot of value on efficiency Which I think you know efficiency no matter the times is always just something that's really really important Whatever you can do if you can do it faster. It's going to be better and also he's sort of been like a you know a little bit of a reference point for me because sometimes I'll be questioning something and I'll be like I
00:06:17
Speaker
Why have people been doing XYZ for so long? Usually my dad's really good for that sort of stuff. He's also a pretty good wellspring of knowledge. He's been a potter forever, so he's done electric firings, he's done gas firings, he's done Raku firings.
00:06:41
Speaker
You know, for me, I'm like a little bit of an antisocial potter. I don't have a lot of network. And so he ends up being someone that I go to with a lot of those questions. What would you say was the biggest lesson that you learned from him? I think probably the biggest lesson I learned from him, you know, I touched on the fact that efficiency has always been something that's been really, really important. But probably the biggest thing is actually
00:07:08
Speaker
learning that you sometimes just need to reinvent yourself. So just a tiny bit of backstory. My dad, you know, was a potter who sold working galleries and did craft fairs and things like that. And he, um, you know, was just kind of your stereotypical folk potter. Um, and he did pretty well with it, but at some point along the way,
00:07:33
Speaker
He's a fairly religious guy. And so he started doing these things where he was giving these presentations to churches. And it was a situation where it would be like, I don't know, first holy communion at like a Catholic church. And so he'd go in, he'd bring his wheel and he'd throw a big pot. He's got this metaphor about how God is the potter, we are the clay. And
00:07:59
Speaker
10 years later, that's all he does right now. So he went from selling work to galleries and doing crafts fairs and having a shop, and now he just only does the stuff with the churches. The only thing he makes are these little Jesus icons, and he throws a lot of chalices by hand that little kids draw on.
00:08:22
Speaker
and for him it's like super super fulfilling because he's like a pretty religious guy and also it's just like I think it's like a great experience because everyone that he talks to just tells him how much they enjoyed him being there for you know this event that they find important but it was a total change from what he had been doing earlier and
00:08:49
Speaker
You know, I think that's been one of the, one of the big things is just like, you know, always be questioning if what you're doing is exactly what you want to do. And, um, you know, it's okay to deviate from the norm and to just sort of follow what you love. And, um, you know, if, if that requires you to just totally change what you're doing before and what you've built up, it's okay to just sort of let it go and move on to the next thing.
00:09:19
Speaker
those that are listening, it's okay to change. It's okay to do something new. That is how you're going to find what you're really going to want to do. Yeah. And I think like wanting to do stuff just to add another tiny tangent. I just listened to this great podcast from between Lex Friedman and Magnus Carlsen. And for those of you who are not familiar Magnus Carlsen, it's basically like the greatest chess player in the world. There's like a huge
00:09:47
Speaker
sort of a drama with him and another player who's you know been accused of cheating so you may have heard his name recently even if you're not in the chess world but he um he's just like undeniably the best chess player in the world and in this interview he's talking about his training regiment and he said that he's a little weird because one of the main things that all professional chess players do he just doesn't do because he doesn't like it
00:10:12
Speaker
He's like, I just don't find them interesting. I don't find them fun. So I just don't do them. And I think like one of the really, really big things is just you got to like stick with what you love, kind of like what you were saying, because you don't want to be in a situation where work just feels like a slog. I mean, that's going to happen anyway. So you just need to minimize that as much as possible. And if you're doing what you love, you're just going to be more interested in it. You're going to be more creative.
00:10:42
Speaker
you know, you're probably going to be more efficient. And it's just like such an important thing to not just do things because you have to. Um, although there will be those things, but to really try to find a way to make it so as much time as possible, you're spending on the things that you do really, really enjoy and think are cool and think are great. Absolutely love it.
Journey into Crystalline Glazes
00:11:03
Speaker
So Andy, can you tell me the story, how you started getting into crystalline glazes?
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah so I only started selling work with crystalline glazes and I believe it was 2017 that I started doing that so I guess you can say professionally I've only been a crystalline glaze potter for like the last five years but I had befriended a ceramic engineer named Phil Hamling probably about four years before that
00:11:34
Speaker
He was someone who runs a fairly large company. He had some time to burn on an expensive hobby, and the hobby that he chose was working with crystalline glazes. And with his ceramic engineering background, he was really, really good. But he wasn't a particularly great potter.
00:11:52
Speaker
So I originally came into contact with him because he wanted to take pottery classes and learn how to be a better potter. And then after taking a couple classes, he was just like, you know what, Andy, forget all this. How about you just make some stuff, bring it to my studio, we'll glaze it together, and then you keep half of it and I'll keep the other half. Because he just wanted to do more stuff with the glazes and he just basically needed canvases to paint on.
00:12:18
Speaker
So he started getting me into crystalline glazes and he had a lot more of a scientific approach compared to anyone else that I had interacted with and a lot of it wasn't a scientific approach in the sense that he had crazy tools or you know some special piece of equipment. A lot of it had to do with just his attention to detail and his note-taking and
00:12:45
Speaker
we started working together more and more. He was a pretty cool person to hang out with. He was just a wealth of technical information because he was a ceramic engineer. And after doing just kind of some casual crystalline glaze stuff with him for like four or five years, I finally started to make the leap to doing it on my own with the things that he taught me. So what would you say that you learned
00:13:15
Speaker
The biggest thing that you learned from him was. So when working with Phil, I think the biggest thing that I learned, it's hard to pin it down into one specific thing. It was kind of a couple different things that all had the same outcome. And so to be a little bit more specific, because he had more of a technical background, he, okay, let me start at the beginning. So,
00:13:43
Speaker
The things that I learned from him that were like really impactful were just having a lot of attention detail and being very, very good with note-taking. And with that also comes everything that you do should be able to be explained. Like there's a lot of times where you hear people say, oh, I had a great firing. Oh, I had a bad firing. If you had a good firing or bad firing, you should be able to figure out exactly what went right or what went wrong.
00:14:13
Speaker
A lot of potters, the phrase that Phil would use is, they're just flying blind because they're not recording certain pieces of information that are kind of important. And so they would be in situations where you'd have professional crystalline glazers who would be losing like 40 or 30% of their work because just something that was out of their control went wrong. And so Phil really taught me that everything
00:14:43
Speaker
should be able to be controlled. And along with that also came a sense of, I think people are doing it wrong. I think it can be done better. Everyone is so stuck in the way that they are used to things being, they're so
00:15:07
Speaker
Uh, stuck on just the tradition of crystalline glazes are runny and they're not reliable. It's kind of similar with, uh, you know, some raccoon potters where they'll just say, you know, sometimes you have a good firing. Sometimes you have a bad firing. It's all up to the killing gods.
00:15:24
Speaker
you know, Phil really sort of put that on it on its head and sort of showed that with really good note taking and attention to detail, you could just get amazing consistency. And once you start getting that amazing consistency, it accelerates your growth because I mean, imagine someone who's trying to work with some glazes and 30% of the time they have a bad firing and they lose their work.
00:15:51
Speaker
that really hurts their income, which in turn hurts their ability to push their research and development. And it also has a really negative effect on their ability to gather information about what's going on or even know what's going on. And so I'd be talking to Phil, and we'd be talking about what we heard some other crystalline glazed potters say. And Phil would just sort of be like,
00:16:20
Speaker
I think this guy's just making up a good sounding story that makes sense to him, but he doesn't actually have a clue what's going on. And so those are sort of the big things that I learned from Phil and they all led me in this one direction of just trying to get a better handle on the crystalline glazes and really feeling like it was possible to get a good handle on them.
00:16:45
Speaker
I absolutely love that because you are literally testing out every single thing and making it better so it makes it better for yourself. I absolutely love that.
Techniques and Challenges in Pottery
00:16:55
Speaker
So can you explain to me how you get all the crazy effects with your crystalline glazes? Yeah, so I mean, some of this is sort of like the beauty of it is that once you have everything dialed in and this comes back to
00:17:12
Speaker
I have a high amount of value on efficiency. But once you have everything dialed in, you really don't have to do very much to get all these crazy effects. So for example, I'm drinking a coffee mug right now, and we can probably get a better shot of it at some point. But you can see that there's greens, there's blues, there's whites, and there's crystals. This is all the same glaze.
00:17:38
Speaker
To glaze this, I just mixed up the glaze. I held it by the foot. I dipped it in that one glaze, put in the kiln, and I was done. And so when you're really, really trying to push the glazes, you can get a lot out of them. And one of the things that I do that is a little bit unique, but I'll take, you know, I'll be really, really diligent about how thick or how thin my glaze goes on the piece.
00:18:07
Speaker
Because basically what's happening here is at the top of the mug where it's a little bit more of a moss green, that's where the glaze is thinnest. And then you move a little bit farther down to where the white is, it's a little bit thicker. And then closer to the bottom, it's a little bit more of a blue color and that's where it's thicker. And so when you have these glazes, like a crystalline glaze, and not all crystalline glazes are like this, but
00:18:34
Speaker
Mine are where they're just very very sensitive to how thick or how thin they are and so you can get this huge color variation depending on You know your ability to control that and you'll see this with other glazes too like you know There's some really easy to understand examples like a good salad on glaze you'll get this really Jade deep green when it's on really thick and
00:19:00
Speaker
And then when it's much thinner, it'll almost be like a white on porcelain. And that's one of the reasons why you see all these amazing carved salad on pieces, especially in historical Asian ceramics. But you also see that in a lot of the more contemporary, like floating blue glazes, where you put them on stoneware and there'll be this toasty brown along all the ridges.
00:19:22
Speaker
like on the edge of a handle or on the edge of the rim, but the rest of the glaze on the surface of the piece will be this textured blue color. So all of these glazes are subject to doing something a little bit different depending on how thick or thin they are.
00:19:40
Speaker
but certain glazes are just even more so. And you mostly find that through trial and error. But then the other thing that I do is I soak all of my pieces in acid. And whenever anyone asks me about this, you know, if you want to try this, I always suggest just using vinegar. Vinegar takes a lot longer. Like if I take one of my pieces out of the kiln, I'll soak it in myriatic acid for like three hours and it's like done.
00:20:09
Speaker
But if you were going to use vinegar, you'd have to soak it for like, you know, two weeks. But vinegar is just something that you don't really have to worry about, whereas muriatic acid is kind of nasty stuff. But the muriatic acid and the vinegar, what they do is they just strip some of the loose metals off the surface. And crystalline glazes are usually fairly high in metals. They have a lot of zinc. You're trying to get the super saturated solution to get the crystals to grow. And so soaking them in acid,
00:20:41
Speaker
There's a lot that the glaze can sort of dissolve at the surface to change the color, but it also makes them a lot more food safe, which is pretty important as well. And then the last thing that I would say has a decent effect on my crystalline glazes has to do with my firing schedule.
00:20:58
Speaker
So like again if you look at one of my mugs and maybe we can get like a better picture of this or you can just look on my Instagram but you'll see these rings growing around the crystals and that's from me zigzagging the temperature up and down and the farther the difference is between
00:21:16
Speaker
how high I go and how low I go when I'm doing those zigzags, there'll be a more dramatic change in the rings of the crystal. So those are some of the things that I think make my glaze sort of stand out and look like it has a lot going on, even though it really is just one glaze. What do those zigzags kind of look like? Like how far the temperature do you drop go up and down?
00:21:46
Speaker
Um, so usually I'll go down to, well, I'll go up to peak temperature, which is about like cone 10 11.
00:21:54
Speaker
And then I'll drop down to about 880 degrees Celsius, and then hold it there for 20 or 30 minutes, go back up to 1080 degrees Celsius, hold it there for like five, and I'll zigzag between those two. Oh, and that's in Celsius, sorry. I forget what is in Fahrenheit, but that is down to 880 degrees Celsius, and up to 1080 degrees Celsius.
00:22:20
Speaker
So can you tell me, when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do to kind of get back into the groove of things? So that's a good question. I'll be honest, I don't really know. I kind of just keep working.
00:22:40
Speaker
And usually the quality of my work goes down and then some sort of personal life thing will just take me away from work that I can't say no to. You know, sometimes it's like, you know, a family member's birthday or, you know, one of my friends is having like a birthday party or something like that. But I would say that, um, at least in this current time period of my life and for the past like year and a half,
00:23:09
Speaker
There's been a pretty unhealthy work-life balance and the feeling of not having total focus and not having feeling burnt out and things like that, those are feelings that are fairly persistent.
00:23:28
Speaker
In an odd sort of way I kind of feel like you just get used to them Which I'm sure has some people in the audience shaking their head But you know a lot of times when I feel really burnt out and exhausted and I can't focus and I'm not feeling creative or I
00:23:52
Speaker
I'm not feeling effective with what I'm doing. Usually the most that I have time for is to simply go grocery shopping, cook myself some food, and go to sleep early. Sometimes I'll try to play some video games on my computer, but those moments are fairly few and far between these days. Honestly, it's been something that you just get
00:24:21
Speaker
get used to. I almost think of it as like someone who trains for like a marathon. You know, it's like marathon runners, they spend so much time training for a marathon and you just kind of have to keep doing it. And you know, you sort of feel like maybe you're still sore from the day before, but you just kind of still show up and do the work and you know,
00:24:47
Speaker
maybe grit your teeth a little bit if you need to, but you just kind of, you just kind of need to push through. I think one thing that makes it a little bit more complicated for some other people compared to me is, you know, I don't have a family and you know, I have a couple of friends that I've been friends with for an extremely long period of time.
00:25:14
Speaker
been very, very lucky to have some excellent friends who have been with me for basically my entire life. But I don't have a particularly big social scene, but I get a lot of satisfaction out of the small amounts of time that I do get to spend with my friends. And with them, it's like, if I'm just tired and overworked, they're just fine with it. But I think it would be a lot different for someone who
00:25:44
Speaker
It would be a lot different for me if I had a family and had to be more active in a social scene where I would probably have to figure out a better answer to that question than to just push through. But that's where I'm at right now. So something that I really love that you do is that you share your knowledge.
Sharing Knowledge and Developing Unique Voice
00:26:03
Speaker
So can you tell me the story on how you started sharing your knowledge about pottery?
00:26:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean one of the big things that people have asked about regarding that is specifically has to do with my crystalline glaze recipes and my techniques and firing schedules. The reason that I share that stuff has to do with a couple different things. One is when I first started working with Phil with crystalline glazes, he was
00:26:36
Speaker
really, really open and honest with me regarding information. And it was great because
00:26:44
Speaker
he had no interest in making money off of the amazing things that he glazed. I mean, he just had like his own personal collection of like museum quality pieces, and he just had no interest in selling them. He just wasn't in it for the money at all. So it was really, really easy to exchange information with him. And other Crystal and Glazed Potters in the community sort of viewed him as like a
00:27:12
Speaker
trusted resource for information where they could provide a little bit more information from him and he could provide a little bit more information to them because you know some of the other people in the community they didn't want to like share techniques because they didn't want someone else to steal their information or you know get an edge on them because they thought themselves as you know part of the same community but also competitors in the same market. When I felt like I
00:27:41
Speaker
really started to sort of run with the things that Phil taught me. It kind of didn't feel like keeping that information to myself was in the same spirit that had been given to me.
00:27:54
Speaker
So I wanted to share for that reason, but also I had seen how destructive it was for the Crystal and Glaze community and just potters in general who are unwilling to share their recipes, unwilling to share their techniques. And this is something that I think you see all over the place, not just among potters, but people get really attached to what they feel like is their intellectual property.
00:28:22
Speaker
And there's definitely a time and a place where you would want to like patent something or keep it to yourself.
00:28:28
Speaker
When you think of it on a little bit more of a macro scale, if you just think of it as this is the field of pottery, I love the field of pottery, I love the community, and I want to see it continue on and grow at as fast of a pace as possible, that's also something that really incentivizes you to want to share information. Because, you know, I'm particularly sensitive about this with the ceramics community because
00:28:58
Speaker
I think being a potter is just so damn hard, you know? And I feel like we're kind of hamstringing the next generation by not letting that information flow a little bit more fluidly so that it can continue to be developed, it can continue to be iterated on, it can continue to be explored.
00:29:21
Speaker
You know, so for those reasons, you know, basically in the spirit that the information was given it to me, I wanted to sort of, you know, give it back out. And also I just wanted to make things easier for the next generation of potters. I absolutely love that. That is really incredible what you do. So now, thanks.
00:29:43
Speaker
Could you tell me what advice would you give to someone looking to find their own unique pottery voice? What would you say? So finding your own unique voice, I think is like a pretty tricky thing. I think one of the things that makes it really, really tricky is from my experience of everything that I've
00:30:06
Speaker
encountered with other people and everything that I've researched is almost everyone who's really, really successful is doing it in a way that's very, very personalized to them. And I think when you're trying to develop your artistic voice and you're trying to make it so that you have something unique to show the world that
00:30:30
Speaker
You kind of have to do a lot of work on yourself. So I think the idea of, and there's some people who just know themselves so well and know exactly what they want to do fresh out of college. And then there's some people who just kind of
00:30:47
Speaker
wander around on a more circuitous path and then there's you know some people who know exactly what they want to do and then they reinvent themselves to do something else. So I think just giving like a fairly broad piece of advice is a little difficult for this question but I think that like you know
00:31:07
Speaker
to give a little bit more of a specific information, I would just try to say do something that you specifically think is awesome, and then try to figure out how to make it marketable. I think you should always try to focus on what you love, what you enjoy, what you think is great, and then
00:31:30
Speaker
figuring out how to make it profitable should be sort of the next step. It's a very, very important step, but I think figuring out your own sense of what you like is the first step to finding your artistic voice. And within that, I think that copying is a great way to do it. And while I'm not in favor necessarily of
00:32:00
Speaker
making a career out of copying other people's work, but just in your own personal time where you're sort of developing forms and developing surfaces, a good place to start is with someone else's work that you really, really like, particularly in ceramics, because not only do you have to get a look that you like,
00:32:21
Speaker
But there's so much technicality to how to do it. If you want a certain type of surface, do you do it just with the glaze? Do you have a slip underneath? Do you use an underglaze? Are you going to put the slip on and scratch it off like a graffito?
00:32:39
Speaker
Or are you going to be using wax to mask areas off? And so if you start with someone's work that you really, really appreciate, you can sort of work through some of the technical issues a little bit more fluidly because you have something specific to imitate. Whereas when you're trying to work from what you envision in your mind
00:33:05
Speaker
it's a lot more abstract and it's a lot more difficult. And so, you know, I think just, you know, taking a potter, like, you know, for example, my professor at RIT was named Julia Galloway and I love her work. And there's been quite a few times where I'll just sit down and I'll just try to make a pot just like Julia does. And I think it's like a great creative exercise for me. And
00:33:34
Speaker
That's the type of work that I love. I love those curved feminine forms with a lot of decoration. A lot of times if I imitate one of her forms, it sort of helps me work out a lot of the technical issues
00:33:52
Speaker
And then if the next thing I do is try to do some new creative form on my own part, it just gives me a much better starting point to reiterate from. So the sound bite for the response to that is basically copy someone that you really, really like and then reiterate it to be more of your own and just kind of follow what you're passionate about and worry about
00:34:21
Speaker
making it marketable later. I definitely agree. I couldn't have said it any better.
Focus and Efficiency in Product Line
00:34:28
Speaker
So as we're coming up on our last question, what is one thing you want to hammer home with my audience today? So one thing that I would like to hammer home with your audience today, which maybe feels a little off topic from so much of our other discussion. But the one thing that I haven't really talked about quite as much is
00:34:51
Speaker
It's really, really good to just be really good at what you do. One of the things that I did for a big portion of my career was to try to make my product line very, very, very narrow. And a lot of times I think that potters get a little caught up in this idea that they need to have like a whole dinnerware set, that if they find one customer who really likes them, that they need to be able to have
00:35:19
Speaker
enough variety of items where they can basically interior decorate their whole home and while that is a beautiful vision and a lot of people do do this and they make it work but if you're struggling on cash and you're trying to make your business a little bit more profitable I think it really really pays to have a very narrow product line
00:35:49
Speaker
You know, like for, there's been, I think there was like a two or three year stretch where basically all I made was coffee mugs, teapots and coffee pour overs with only like a few sugars and creamers.
00:36:06
Speaker
And what that did for me was it just made it so I was really efficient at making coffee mugs. And my teapots started getting really, really good in terms of how the forms were structured. And you sort of want to view it as, you know, there's like a Malcolm Gladwell quote where he's like, you're not really an expert on something until you've put in your 10,000 hours. And you may have put in your 10,000 hours with pottery in general, but
00:36:36
Speaker
Have you put in your 10,000 hours with teapots specifically? Because if you do put in your 10,000 hours with teapots specifically, they're probably going to be better and you're probably going to be able to make them faster. And if you can make them better, that means you can probably raise your prices a little bit or have less competition because people just gravitate towards your work a little bit more quickly.
00:37:02
Speaker
And if you're producing them faster, those two things together just increase your hourly wage, which if you can increase your hourly wage, that means you can develop more, you can research more, you can maybe have a personal life. Things like that are pretty attractive. But I think that when you try to have a really wide product line
00:37:28
Speaker
it can be a little bit of a trap where you start to feel like you're in like a little bit of a rat race because, you know, you may look at your work and you're like, yeah, it's all like pretty good. And I'm not the fastest potter, but I'm like pretty fast. And I feel like if you're saying things like that to yourself, that you're sort of, you know, missing out on the value of just doing a small number of things and do them really, really well.
00:37:55
Speaker
because I think that that is what pays. Also, it's just like, you know, a beautiful thing when you can go really, really deep on something. You know, that's when you really start getting to be creative. Like, if you're making dinnerware plates one day and coffee mugs the next day and then you're making some pictures the next day and then mixing bowls the next day, you know, a lot of times you don't actually have an opportunity to be that creative with them.
00:38:24
Speaker
because the first couple that you do, you just need to make them the same way that you've done in the past because you know that's what you need. And also you're kind of like getting warmed up and remembering how to throw the form. And then as soon as you've sort of made the number that you need and you're like all warmed up and have that form in your mind, you're just moving on to the next thing. And you're not spending that time to like go deeper, really refine your throwing skills,
00:38:54
Speaker
figure out small things like, can I throw this with just a quarter of a pound less clay and have them be just as nice but a little lighter? Or can I just throw these a little faster? Or maybe I should alter the rim in this way and see how that looks? Or, all right, I've got
00:39:17
Speaker
a hundred mugs. Let's try to like paint some fish on a couple of them. Um, when you're so yeah, just like do fewer things and try to do them really well. And that's like when you get to be really creative. I absolutely love that. It's like the quote from Bruce Lee. What is it? It's a, I fear not the man who knows 10,000 kicks, but I fear the man who knows one kick and does it 10,000 times. Right? Yeah. That's exactly the same sort of thing. Yep. Absolutely.
00:39:47
Speaker
Andy, it was really great talking to you today.
Social Media and Rebranding
00:39:50
Speaker
Where can my audience go and connect with you? So the best place to find me is probably on Instagram. My name on Instagram is Cowlin Tiger.
00:40:01
Speaker
It's a little bit of a weird word for some of you. It's spelled K-A-O-L-I-N-T-I-G-E-R. And Kalin is basically like an insider way of saying porcelain. So it basically means porcelain tiger. But for those of you who are familiar with your raw materials, you know, EPK is like one of the main things that's used in a lot of glazes and a lot of porcelain and stands for Edgar's plastic Kalin.
00:40:27
Speaker
Callan just means callonite, which is the mineral that porcelain is made from. I also have a website called Callan Tiger Studios, but because I have to go through this long tangent about what callan means and
00:40:42
Speaker
I'm probably going to be going through some rebranding pretty soon. So if you are one of the first listeners to listen to this podcast, search for the Calentiger on Instagram or Calentiger Studios as my website, but the rebranding will be simply as Boswell Studios. So if you search for both of those, you'll find me.
00:41:08
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.