Brian Jones
It’s an experience as old as mankind—jamming your fingers into a lump of wet, red mud scooped from the ooze of an ancient lake; as old as a preschool summer dodging wasps in the muck under a kiddie pool, wet dirt and snails and grass. A pie. A pot. Kodachrome dreams of watermelon reds and sno-cone blues, stuffing your fingers into a mound of alluvium belched up from the belly of the earth; the masticated remnants of towering sequoias, luffing seagrass, horsefly wings, bear hides, mastodon cud and nightcrawler crud. It’s like a conversation. A jam session. Trading fours with Etruscan potters and stealing licks from T’ang glaziers. Taking your own clay out for a spin. Looking back to ask, “How’d you like that?”
Raised in the suburbs of Syracuse, NY I was drawn to art as a kid and teenager. Calvin and Hobbes and Richard Scarry books were early influences. I started working with clay as an undergraduate at Alfred University and by my second semester in ceramics it became the calling. I earned my MFA from Southern Methodist University and have been all over the country teaching workshops, as a visiting artist and setting up my booth at a variety of craft shows. I live on the Connecticut Shoreline with my family. I also run the Shoreline Clay Club, a local community clay studio. I’m good at making my wife and kids laugh, and I’m lucky for what I have.
