The Union County Harvest Festival was today! I’ll be posting my photos from the event over the next few days.
This ceramic artist, Simon B. Keller, was one of the many friendly artisans showing his work. (I featured him last year, too! I had a longer conversation with him this year, though.)
Mr. Keller learned his craft in Japan, he says, where students don’t start at the bottom and work their way up— they start below the bottom. He wasn’t permitted to touch the clay until he’d paid his dues, learning the other odd jobs around the studio. It’s an understandably frustrating process, but it isn’t until you understand that aspect of the craft that you can appreciate how all the cogs of the art— the small but important aspects that you might otherwise ignore— fit together to form a whole.
Although Mr. Keller has been creating ceramics for twenty years, in recent years he’s started instructing at Plainfield’s duCret school of Art, the oldest private art institution in New Jersey.