Adrian Quintanar: Throwing Colorful, Functional Pottery

About this Episode

Crafting a single piece of pottery can take up to three weeks. There’s the design stage, then the piece is created on the pottery wheel and must dry completely before it goes into the kiln. “If that moisture, as it leaves the clay, if it is rushed, it will crack in the kiln,” Quintanar explained. “It has to be bone dry, that’s what we call it when all the moisture is out of the pot. That takes days.”

The firing takes a few days, and then the pot is glazed and fired again. The kilns at the arts center are massive and can fit a couple of thousand pieces. With about 200 students and teachers creating throughout the week, it still takes time to fill the kilns.

Now, Quintanar is working on his end-of-residency show and experimenting with colored clay and colorful slips. “I want the show to be really bright and colorful,” Quintanar shared. “I’ve been making my own clay and mixing up my own slips, which are colorful slips that are applied on the surface.”

Slips consist of clay with water added and can be painted on a piece of pottery. Quintanar has been focused on experimenting for four months and has found some trial and error in the process. “I’ve had a lot of failures recently, after the firings, losing the colors,” he explained. “I could show you tons of tests of little white cups that are supposed to be purple and pink and blue. … I really finally think I’ve come upon a direction that might work. I haven’t so much thought about the forms yet. Like I said, I want it to be functional. So, of course, there will be bottles, jars and cups and possibly bowls. But there’s so many design elements to choose from, so I need to do a lot of brainstorming and drawing and sketching for those things, but I think it’s going to be really exciting. It’s going to be really colorful if it all goes well.”