Hope everyone is having a great summer! To help spark interest in my newest artwork, I’m giving away one “Cosmic Mug” each month, totally free. You’re reading this…so you’re probably on my mailing list and automatically entered in the random giveaway! (If not, signup here). If you’re the lucky winner, you’ll receive an e-mail asking for your address so we can send a pot at absolutely no cost to you. And this month’s winner is…drumroll, please…
Subscriber #436: m********@aol.com! CONGRATULATIONS! Thanks to everyone else who signed up!
While these mugs are almost entirely sold out in my online store, I’m currently working on a new body of artwork. A whole bunch of cosmic mugs will be available in the coming months at a discounted price. Please watch for more of these e-mails to find out when you can get a great deal on my newest artwork.
Be sure to check out Instagram for the freshest pottery updates:
Artists all over the world struggle to find ways to avoid attaching the word “starving” to their job title. For ceramic artists, this often means going to graduate school, becoming a professor, and building networks in academia. Recent industry polls (from the NCECA blog) show how 50% of ceramic artists are academics. Non-academics support their art by selling their wares, working part-time, and pairing with community art centers or galleries. These are all great options.
But are there ways to support art making that we haven’t yet discovered?
Our plan is to utilize the internet to face the “starving artist” fear by forging new paths that would not have been possible until recently. By trying to explore every possible connection through the internet, and then focusing on the few that succeed, we discover new ways to get pottery into people’s hands.
In case you haven’t seen the Facebook posts, Joel is giving away one Cosmic Mug each month to help spark interest in his new work. You’re reading this, which means you’re probably on the mailing list and automatically entered in the monthly random Cosmic Mug giveaway! If you’re the lucky winner, you’ll receive an e-mail asking for your address so we can ship you a free Cosmic Mug at absolutely no cost to you. And the first winner is…drumroll, please…
Subscriber #255: r********@yahoo.com YAHOOOO! CONGRATS! Thanks to everyone else who signed up! Keep your hopes up for your chance to win the next monthly Cosmic Mug giveaway, posted at the end of May.
Social media sites and blogs let us creatively market pottery at extremely low costs. More popular blogs expose Cosmic Mugs to people who might never have seen them otherwise, like the Laughing Squid feature that got 1,000+ social media interactions.
We think it would be awesome to get Cosmic Mugs featured by mainstream media, where millions of people would see what beautiful handmade ceramics look like. Talk show hosts and their guests so often drink from boring, mass-produced coffee mugs. Wouldn’t a Cosmic Mug look cooler?
From left to right: Bill Nye (THE SCIENCE GUY), Boring Mug, and Chuck Nice
The internet allows us to build a network among celebrities. A few months ago, we started communicating through Facebook to people at StarTalk Radio. Their host, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, has six Cosmic Mugs in his office right now! The radio show has since evolved into a TV show, airing every Monday on National Geographic Channel.
StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson airs on Mondays at 11/10C on National Geographic Channel
#1 New York Times Best-selling author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss podcasts through the Tim Ferriss Podcast, and he also launched a killer, new TV show this week: The Tim Ferriss Experiment. Oh yeah, Tim also owns a Cosmic Mug!
This week I am writing a letter to Bill Nye the Science Guy and sending it along with a Cosmic Mug and an issue of American Craft to the Planetary Society in California. We joined the Planetary Society, and we hope they will like the way Cosmic Mugs bring distant wonders into our hands, allowing people to experience the feeling of space.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with becoming a teacher or professor to support yourself as an artist – many of Joel’s greatest inspirations are teachers (shout out to Ben Carter – innovative educator and podcaster who you pottery people will love.) But we’re devoted to exploring new ways to find success in the ceramics field by teaching indirectly. Connections that started online have already brought Joel’s pottery into the hands of over half a dozen celebrities and astronauts: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Tim Ferriss, Bryan Callen, Joe Rogan, Brendan Schaub, Buzz Aldrin, & Mike Massimino. Monday a Cosmic Mug not only goes in the mail to Bill Nye, but also to Matt Mullenweg. He created WordPress, which not only runs my website, but 23% of the entire internet!
Our global vision is to reach a tipping point that causes pottery to enter the mainstream eye. Stayed tuned…
After creating my newest body of artwork, “Cosmic Mugs” with glazes inspired by images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, I find myself asking, “Why?” Why try to show huge galaxies and nebulae on a small mug? I turned to mainstream science advocate Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson for guidance. During the Origins Project at Arizona State University, Dr. Tyson critiqued an iconic painting by Vincent van Gogh: The Starry Night.
“I want and I need the artist to take me to new places, and the new place van Gogh took me is not the sky as it is, but the sky as he felt it. And the more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.”
Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson, photo by Andy DeLisle, Arizona State UniversityCosmic Pottery Mug, “Emmission Nebula” (detail) captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and “The Starry Night” (detail) by Vincent van Gogh
Unlike a painting or sculpture, pottery mugs are meant to be touched, picked up and brought to the mouth and nose. How many other types of artwork do you actually touch with such intimate parts of your body? I want my “Cosmic Mugs” to communicate beauty like a van Gogh painting, while deeply engaging multiple senses. Why does art that hangs on a wall deserve more value than art that holds coffee or tea? I make these “Cosmic Mugs” to challenge that notion by letting people experience fine art in daily life.
How many brush strokes are in a van Gogh painting? Thousands and thousands! How do my simple coffee mugs relate when they have only a few brush strokes?
Complexity is revealed in the kiln firing. Raw earth metals like iron, copper and cobalt are mixed with water and brushed onto the pot. Massive energy is needed to fire each pot to 2400 degrees F, melting glaze chemicals together into a hard, glassy surface. I give up control, letting the kiln melt glazes into an abstract painting that I can never fully predict.
Will my glazes ever compare to the complexity of a Hubble image? This photo of the Andromeda galaxy has 1.5 billion pixels and you would need 600 HD TV screens to see the true photo!
Looking closely at each pottery mug gives us a deeper understand of how Hubble images manifest as abstract glaze paintings. It shouldn’t look identical, but it should feel similar.
Cosmic Mugs are…
Durable: Stoneware pottery is very hard and meant to last a lifetime.
Functional: 100% non-toxic and dishwasher safe.
Handcrafted: I make each pot from a lump of Stoneware clay on a pottery wheel.
Complex: Every mug is brushed with up to 5 different glaze colors.
Earthen: Raw iron, copper and cobalt are harvested from the earth & fired in a kiln to 2400 degrees F to seal colors with silica glaze for non-toxic, food-safe surfaces.
On of a Kind: Each firing results in glazes that I can never duplicate exactly.
We can look closely with detail shots, extreme zooms, and even a microscope to get a better understanding of the subtle textures that can’t be seen with the naked eye.
Photo by Marissa Deml
Cosmic Mug detail under 20X magnification, Photo by Jon Cahill
Even simply enjoying a cup of coffee outdoors in bright sunlight can reveal new subtleties.
Hubble images are free for anyone to use in the public domain, as long as proper credit is given. I sent a mug to the Space Telescope Science Institute as a thanks for freely providing such beautiful images, and hopefully to build bridges between art & science.
Stay tuned for just a few new jewels popping up in my online store in the coming months!
Thanks for reading! Check out my Instagram to stay updated with my newest pottery:
“Why is Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a Cosmic Mug?” I’d say that’s a fair question. Stay tuned for details…
Tim Ferriss is the first celebrity to show me that he understands the value of handmade pottery as fine art. Last month, he let me mail him a couple mugs. As a thanks, he sent a tweet to his one million+ Twitter followers and 278,000+ Facebook fans. This led to 3,507 people going to my website in one day- WOAH!
If you haven’t heard of Tim Ferriss, he’s an amazing writer and entrepreneur. His book,“The Four Hour Workweek” changed my life. He inspired me to apply to break a Guinness World Record (which you’ll hear more about in the coming weeks!) and hooked me up with an order of over 2,000 Cosmic Mugs.
This week, Tim interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger on his podcast. It’s hilarious and inspiring, you should listen to it here on iTunes. In fact, if you just go to his website and check it out, I’ll e-mail you a $20 gift certificate for free pottery. There’s no catch, I’m just doing this as a thanks to Tim, to hopefully turn some of you onto his work. It’s also a thanks to any of you who are interested enough to read about my work! Here’s what to do:
2.) Email me at joel@cherricopottery.com and tell me, “I checked out Tim Ferriss’ site!” That’s it! This is the honor system, but I hope you check it out. If you enjoy my story, I think you will enjoy spending a little more time seeing what Tim is all about.
3.) If done before Friday 2/6/15 at 6pm, I will reply to your email with a custom coupon code for $20 free pottery, good for anything in my online store, with no expiration date.
Thanks for reading! Check out my Instagram to stay updated with my newest pottery:
Thirty-four years ago, astronomer and Cosmos host Carl Sagan made his famous claim:
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan. “The Lives of the Stars.” Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. PBS. 1980.
Sagan could have been talking about making anything from scratch. His goal was to convey that everything on earth, everything in the universe, is made up of precise combinations of the most basic elements, and those elements were created in stars’ nuclear cores. We could also say, “If you wish to make a pot from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
These star-forged elements combine to form all the components of ceramics: the different strains of clay (silicon and iron), the water used in throwing (oxygen and hydrogen), the arboreal ingredients of glazes (calcium), and even the potter himself (carbon). Entire books could be written focusing solely on one of these ceramic elements.
Copper, for example. Copper red glazes have been meticulously pursued and produced since the fifteenth century in China. The new host of Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson, often analyzes the concept of a “Goldilocks planet” – a planet which has the precise conditions for possibly sustaining life. A successful copper red glaze is a “Goldilocks glaze.” Everything in both the recipe and the firing must be perfect.
Caution: No room for error.
As Sagan and Tyson have taught us, science is found in everything we do. Baking an apple pie from scratch, developing a new drug, and mixing and firing glazes all rely on experimentation, creativity, and chemical reactions. A potter doesn’t need a degree in chemistry, but he uses some pretty cool science to produce copper red glazes.
Nowadays, gas-fired kilns produce the best conditions for copper red glazes, but ancient Chinese potters created their beautiful pieces using only wood-fired kilns. Many potters do not have regular access to gas- or wood-fired kilns, and use electric ones instead. Electric kilns eliminate the need for constant temperature monitoring, but they are unable to create the atmosphere copper red glazes require.
Hello in there!
Copper red glazes need to be fired to a temperature called “cone 10.” This photo shows three cones (small pieces of clay), set up inside a gas-fired kiln. Each of these pieces is made from a different factory-produced type of clay formulated to melt at a certain temperature. A device called a pyrometer can be used to measure the temperature of the air inside the kiln, but what really matters is the temperature of the clay, hence the use of cones. When cone 10 melts, the potter knows the clay is roughly 2345 °F.
Even inside the same kiln, the atmosphere unavoidably varies. The pots below all had the same glaze and firing, but were placed in different areas of the kiln.
The green color on the right also occurs when firing a copper glaze in an electric kiln.
Color, just like copper, depends on the stars. Light from our sun strikes objects on earth, and those objects absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. The wavelengths they reflect are the colors we see. As Tyson puts it:
“Color is the way our eyes perceive how energetic light waves are.” – Neil Degrasse Tyson. “Hiding in the Light.” Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Fox. 2014.
Thankfully, potters did not have to create the universe to make pots from scratch. Their ingredients are already present in the cosmos, swirling in the air and lurking in the earth, waiting for them.
Chuquicamata Copper Mine in Chile. (Image: Property of Till Niermann, located in the Wikimedia Commons.)
