I spent a short time in Ketchum/Sun Valley Idaho before going on to graduate school. It was very formative to my thinking and my creativity for the rest of my life. I want to thank Jim Romberg for that. Jim was the creative director and resident artist of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. It was philosophically interested in the crossroads of all arts and had an exceptional ceramics program.

Soda, Salt, Low-fire and Raku: I was there because I knew Jim had been a student of Paul Soldner, from the Anderson Ranch. So, after finishing my BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder, I wanted to reconnect with that thread. I was still interested in raku, and in a Japanese line that was running through my life and my art. When I got there, I found a group of production potters that were rigorous, self-supporting and committed to their craft. The ceramics program here, under Jim’s direction was probably worth more than 2 years of graduate school, and I thrived.

Jim’s art was incredibly beautiful, sophisticated and colorful. He worked with abstract slab forms. I was very inspired to try to achieve some of his effects in my own work. I searched for my own interpretation, and I still see those traces in my work today.

I appropriated a small catenary arch kiln no one was using, and I started doing low-fire soda/salt firings of large platters with brush work in black and white slips. I added wood at the end to create a long flame and used a technique of placing bricks or shards to resist the smoke in certain places. I also did raku pieces with terra cotta clay to take advantage of the red color. Please excuse the ancient slides turned digital. I have lost most of the detail, but you can get a sense the process.

Before leaving for graduate school, I asked Jim to take a look at work I had done at CU Boulder. I had started to construct 3D landscapes on the inside of wheel thrown bowls. It was a sculptural extension of Wayne Higby’s work, I guess. Jim said a very simple thing that changed the trajectory of my work forever. He said, “I don’t understand why you are keeping your ideas on the inside of a bowl.”

I went to Michigan and I started hand building abstract forms and I really flourished with sculptural forms in clay. I never looked back. I took all the firing techniques with me, but I turned to sculpture to express my ideas.

See this former post on Raku https://www.nadeau.com/raku/