WALLYWARE

It’s Showtime!

NOTE: THE NOAH VAN SCIVER COLLABORATIVE SERIES IS FOR SALE IN OUR ONLINE STORE

The kiln is out, everything looks good and I seem to be spending a lot of time fussing with the pots today. Taking photos, assembling clocks, gluing magnets and putting together the consignment list has taken a lot more time than it did to ship out the regular wholesale orders I dealt with yesterday. It always amazes me how making your best pots is way less profitable than making your average pots. But it will be fun to have an opening and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of response these new pieces get.

I’m thinking about adding four pieces to the show that weren’t done by Noah. Two of them were collaborations with Chris Smith and the other two were painted by John Lacey. All four are some of the most novel and ambitious pieces I’ve ever been a part of, and they have been gathering dust in my studio for years now. I’ve invested a fair amount of hourly wages in them, and it would be nice to recoup some of my investment. Also, I can put a high price on them and it will make Noah’s “high ticket” items seem not quite so expensive. All four are posted below, and I think it would be nice to get them out of the studio. The first one, a shallow bowl entitled “Chris Smith is a Fucking Genius” took a total of eight hours to decorate. Let me see… with wages, withholding and workers comp, I’ve probably got close to $120 invested in this one. So if I sell it for $250, the gallery gets half and I make a cool five dollars profit. The other ones weren’t quite so time-consuming to paint, but they do represent a high water mark for my art. Yeah… I can afford to get rid of them. It’s time.

The Mud-Pie Dilemma Part 2

I’m not very inspired to post this week so I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Noah has been in the studio painting like mad and the show pieces are done. My favorite ones are these plates. I think the colors will really pop when they come out of the kiln. Pricing is going to be weird as some of the mugs actually took longer to paint than these plates, which should fetch a higher price. For some reason, the public won’t pay much more than $35.00 for a mug, but a nice plate could get twice that much. If we do another show, it might be best to do nothing but plates. The pic on the bottom are the refrigerator magnets…. too cool!
Note: This series is now for sale in our online store!

The Mud-Pie Dilemma Revisited

The Mud-Pie Dilemma is the much-loved book for all of us baby-boomer potters.Written by John Nance, it chronicles pottery legends Tom and Elaine Coleman and their struggle to earn a living selling pots back in the 1970s. After observing the couple for a number of months, the author concluded that their effort to put together a showing of the best pots of their career netted them a sub-minimum wage for the endeavor. But the photos of the pots in the back of the book are to die for and this text was a true inspiration for me when I started making pots for a living over thirty years ago. Fortunately, Tom and Elaine are far more financially successful now, and their work continues to boggle the mind.

With slow sales in the Wallyware line, I’ve taken on a mud-pie dilemma of my own. I agreed to throw fifty pots in a collaborative show with Noah Van Sciver, cartoonist nonpareil, really nice guy and my oldest daughter’s boyfriend. We’ve got a show lined up at the Earthwood Gallery in Boulder and the opening night is March 6th. Noah has been working on the pots for a couple of days now, and he should have them finished sometime next week. There are some really nice graphics getting painted on these pots. I was amazed that the very first thing he did in the studio was to decorate the two most ambitious pots of the series: a pair of vases. He knocked them out in a relatively short period of time and they are lovely. So it’s going to be a fun show and we are in the process of trying to peddle our situation to various media outlets. It is a really sweet story: the potter/caroonist dad and the cartoonist boyfriend working together in the studio with the Brian Jonestown Massacre blaring in the background. Ahhh… the lives of a struggling artists!

But the finances of this gig are not going to be the best. I think we’re going to beat Tom and Elaine Coleman in the profit margin category, but not by much. That’s the problem with taking your time and doing your best work. It doesn’t always pay off very well financially. But the pots are going to be cool… way cool!
Note: This series is now for sale in our online store!

Sinful Pottery

There are a lot of sins in my studio right now. The fact is,
I’m dealing with all seven of them: wrath, gluttony, lust, greed, envy, sloth and pride. The reason for this is I’m throwing pots for a collaborative show with underground comic artist, Noah Van Sciver. He suggested the sins as a take-off point for his comic art so I’m knocking out some mugs that will celebrate these seven defects of human nature. Noah is an emerging comic artist and my oldest daughter’s boyfriend. I’ve lined up a showing at Earthwood Gallery in Boulder for these pots and it will be fun to see how they turn out. Sales are incredibly slow in Wallyworld these days, so it’s a good time to do something new. I’m feeling particularly slothful this week, so I’ll let the pictures tell the story for now.

That dude who got elected president is right. Change IS coming!

Permit me to lapse into the introspective, self-absorbed mode of blogging that was discussed a bit in last week’s post. No, I’m not going to show you a picture of a super clean toilet. But I will bare my soul to the world just a bit.

The topic for this week’s post is, “How is the current world economic crisis affecting Wallyware Pottery?” The short answer here is, “A whole lot”. Ever since the mid 1980s, I’ve been selling the majority of my work through fine craft galleries. Since then, the fourth quarter of the year has always been the pleasantly busy time of year with each kiln load filled with wholesale orders that get shipped out of the studio the day the pots are unloaded from the kiln. In our heyday in the late 1980s, I had a potter working for me and two decorators painting for me during the holiday season to meet the demand. We had clipboards filled with orders and at times the galleries had to wait up to six weeks to receive their orders. My overhead was a lot lower then, and the cost of everything has gone up significantly for a number of reasons. Needless to say, I used to make a darn good income when we lived in Los Angeles! But this year, the majority of my steady accounts didn’t even place their regular holiday orders, and the ones that did sent us much smaller orders than in the past. So I have a lot of pots in my stock room right now and I’m looking at next year realizing that I need to find some new ways to make money. And I’m not alone, am I?

The one bright spot in all of this is that it has inspired me to be more creative. My online webstore was languishing for a number of years and I’m putting more energy into it now and it’s paying off. Thank goodness that my fans are still buying my pots! I’m actually getting more orders than last year through the webstore right now, but the size of the average order is significantly smaller than it was just a year ago. As Bill Clinton would say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” So with the slower sales, I’ve been more inspired to come up with new designs. My “What’s New” section is a real testament to the fact that I’m trying hard to keep this business from going under. The new 401K mug and that Obama ornament are selling pretty well. This blog and the spin off “Stump the Sage” blog have been wonderfully fun to write, but I’m not sure if the time spent on them has been worth it in terms of sales. I’ll probably have the imaginary monkey that writes the “Stump the Sage” blog get lost in a plane crash in the jungle in January. Things either wax or wane, and that project should start to wane soon. But it was wonderfully fun to create and it was nice to get a “thumbs up” from Bret Saunders on the radio last week. So the exercise of writing once a week has been a good challenge for me and I’m glad I took it on.

The other thing that is going to make my business change a lot in the new year is the fact that my assistant, Kelly is leaving in mid-January for a four month semester at sea program. Kelly has been working for me for over a year now and she is an absolutely perfect person to work with. She’s great at the details of painting and shipping pots, and she is a true friend who is very easy to get along with. To top it off, she is a distance runner with amazingly similar tastes in music, movies, etc. Having her work for me is like having another way-cool daughter!

So rather than hire someone new right off the bat, I’m going to grind out a couple more kiln loads before Kelly takes off and put the pottery studio in a dormant mode if the orders don’t come in next month. And I’m guessing that this is going to be the case, considering my orders have been slow the past few months. We will still have pots for sale in the webstore, of course, and I’ll be putting a lot of energy into trying new marketing strategies via the web. But I’m preparing for the worst, and to meet my financial obligations to my family, I’ll probably have to look for a paying job. This is a bit daunting as, in all honesty, the only things I’m really exceptional at are making pots, running long distance and rock trivia. One of my goals with all this is not to be a disgruntled middle-aged man who feels sorry for himself. I love a good challenge! But it’s going to be damn weird as I haven’t had a “real” job since 1978, my senior year in college.

So how do I end this post? How about some nice pictures from earlier this week. On Thursday morning I sent Robin an email and invited her to come up to paint pots for holiday gifts. It’s something she and Monica have been doing ever since they can remember. She brought her boyfriend, Noah and they had a nice afternoon raiding the refrigerator and painting pots. Noah is carving out more and more notoriety in the local cartooning scene, and I like his work a lot. It was really fun to see what he came up with for the pots. He’s got a comic talk/book signing with John Porcellino coming up on 12/20 at Kilgore Books. If you live in the Denver area, check it out!