This is what I said in a pottery class about ten years ago when the instructor asked what we wanted to achieve from “Introduction to Wheel Throwing.”

It wasn’t my first pottery rodeo, as I’d taken several classes with my mom and sister when I was a teenager. Back then, our collective results were a bunch of chunky, heavy attempts at drinking vessels that best served as pen and pencil holders. We still have them today — still holding pens and pencils and markers — and they continue to serve as great examples of what I don’t want my creative legacy to be.

So when I took several wheel throwing classes ten years ago I moderately improved to create some pretty bowls that I still use on a daily basis (see #5 in my Top Five Art Accidents blog for an example). But even with practice I was still creating heavy-bottomed, thick-walled vessels that just weren’t achieving my desire.

When I began experimenting with hand built pieces, a process in which you roll out slabs of clay to thin and delicate sheets, I finally found a technique that matched my creative vision with technical capability.

Over the years, I’ve refined my technique, changed my primary material to a beautiful porcelain clay, and found my creative voice in the pop art porcelain imagery you see today.

A few years ago I made some custom bubbly glasses as gifts for colleagues in Bratislava, Slovakia. That was during what I call my Easter Egg phase in which I painted each piece with vivid colors and speech bubbles with fun little quotes, each a colorful flight of fancy plucked from a bright Easter morning.

They were light, airy, delicate pieces intended to be as bubbly as the champagne they were created for, the antithesis of the chunky, heavy, bulky pencil holders of my youth.
When I gave my friend Katarina — herself an artist and lover of art — her custom-crafted porcelain piece, she exclaimed “Oh this is perfect!”

She turned to her desk, collected together a handful of pens and pencils, stuck them into the piece, and proudly placed her new pencil holder on her desk.

Some things never change.

That day ten years ago in which I firmly stated I wanted to create something more than pencil holders was years in the making.

I first started at IBM as a web writer, creating copy for IBM WebSphere middleware products (“Goodyear’s rubber meets the road with IBM WebSphere”) but over the years I shifted to less purely creative and more leadership-oriented roles. When I realized my only work-related creative release came from finely-crafted e-mails and eye-popping PowerPoint charts, I knew I needed to find a creative outlet outside of IBM.

Thus my foray into pottery and evolution into ceramic arts.

As with many emerging (and established) artists I still have my day job. I continue to fuel my e-mails and PowerPoint charts with as much creative inspiration as possible, and I find great rewards in promoting innovation and creativity in the development of software and the refinement of business processes.

And the daily work in high tech provides creative inspiration for my pop art porcelain, as many of my pieces feature images that juxtapose 50s and 60s era comic characters with modern and futuristic technological concepts.

One of my favorite works, iWatch DNA, is truly anachronistic in that I created that piece and its sister plate — featuring an “iWatch” and “Google Glasses” — before either the Apple Watch or Google Glass had been officially released and named.

Other pieces include daily life usage of futuristic technology like contact lenses with which you can check Twitter, the Hyperloop popularized by Elon Musk, and a Virgin sub-space plane (based on an old DC-3) to go from continent to continent in a few hours, which you know Sir Richard Branson is definitely thinking and planning for.

I love the concept that these whimsical far-fetched images will be someone’s money-making patents of tomorrow.

In addition to the Lichtenstein-like comic characters, my creative efforts have been inspired by my love of the common daffodil, or narcissus or jonquil — to me a daffodil by any other name is still a daffodil.

Spring is always such an amazing time for all of us, as we emerge from the cold grayscale grips of winter and find our rebirth amidst the emerging colors of nature.

While I go into more depth about my association with daffodils in my Places everyone! blog post, the short story here is that I love them and I love to anthropomorphize them.

Let’s assume the flowers think and they each have their own names and individual personalities, then what do they say to each other?  How do they interact? What are their motivations? What makes them happy and what makes them sad?

Often this revolves around the Sun and the warmth and light it brings, sometimes it’s interactions with other flowers like tulips and roses, and then there are concepts around the flower bulbs being raised in fields and then shipped off to the new world.

My true joy with these pieces is giving such flowers a presence throughout the year… Daffodils, not just for spring anymore!