I've had a very busy winter and spring leading into summer. Winter was spent building a small studio behind our new house in Kobe. Once finished I was able to more freely concentrate on making pots. The firing went very smoothly, I had good help throughout. And both shows, in Kobe and Osaka were well attended with OK sales.

Building the studio, of course, took longer than planned. But with the help of John Fleming, a young Canadian with an inordinate amount of free time. A deep sea diver, John works 2-3 months on oil rigs then has a month or 2 off when he lives in Kobe with his fiancee Amy who is one of my pottery students. I had never built a real building that required framing windows and doors and stuff like that. But with the inspiration of my father, who purportedly built our cabin with a hammer in one hand and a "How to Build a Cabin" book in the other I figured this small shed would be a breeze. Unfortunately I never bought the "How to Build a Shed" book. If I had I probably wouldn't have made a couple of basic design mistakes that made the job much more difficult than it should have been. The first problem was that the space for the studio was very small and wider at one end than the other. I wanted to maximize the space so the studio ended up a trapezoidal shape with no right angles. This made almost every cut for every joint a challenge. The other problem was my decision to use old salvaged beams in the basic frame then 2x4s for the rest. Again nothing matched up. But we fudged our way through it and am pretty happy with the results. I'm now set up as I like with studio space in both the city, where we live and in the country where the kiln is. And more importantly; Chika now has a place to work.

  I had a great crew for the firing this spring. Kjell Hahn  moved out to Sasayama from Himeji to work with me and another local potter. He has been helping me off and on for the past year, so he had a couple of firings under his belt. He became a very dependable hand. We also had a Scotsman, Douglas Murray come for a month to help. Douglas is an architect, pottery enthusiest, who had the crazy notion that it would be fun to fire a wood kiln on his vacation. He was great to have on hand. No job was too dirty or difficult for him. His cheerful witty personality kept everyone loose. Kjell's friend from college, Jimmy came in for the end of the firing and gave us a needed boost of energy. Jimmy is at Nagoya University of Art on a Fullbright doing some interesting conceptual stuff. Please visit their websites; www.kjellhahn.com and www.jimmykuehnle.com.
The kiln fired well, with good work throughout. Unfortunately I had a show opening a week after the unloading and didn't have time to photograph the pieces till after the shows. With a lot of the work selling this update will be a little thinner than usual.

  From now I will be preparing for my fall firing, though August will be spent in Michigan with my parents. The next firing looks particularly exciting as I will be hosting 3 potters from the States followed by an exhibition in Kyoto.

  Thank you for viewing this site. Please email me any thought on this site and my work.