Gerald Arrington’s lifelong love of stones shows in the pottery he produces – which appears to be made of rock, not clay – and his passion for creating it can be seen all over his face when he’s working at his potter’s wheel.
“The sensual forms of river stones have been a source of interest and inspiration throughout my life. I hold, examine, stack, skip, and frequently bring them home,” the Sebastopol ceramist said in his artist’s statement.
But not a word need be uttered to get this message when at his studio, where before guests even reach his creative space, they first walk past his cairn fountain located in an outdoor sculpture garden.
Inside, shelves house an assortment of Arrington’s unique vases, bowls, teapots and even salt and pepper shakers, among other pieces influenced by his time spent at the river. But rocks aren’t the only thing he makes from clay. Pieces of driftwood, too, used as the handles for his teapots, aren’t really driftwood.
“All of this was inspired when I was living in Idaho on a river. I was a fly fisherman and I used to spend as much time looking at the stones as I did fishing,” Arrington said. “Traveling as a kid I’d always pick up stones; in fact, I still do. Wherever we travel, we tend to pick up a stone or two from that area,” he added.
“Clay is eroded stone. When stone decomposes, it becomes clay deposits in a river system … Clay is eroded rock and now I am taking that clay and turning it back into rock. That is the circularity that is kind of fun,” he said, noting, however, he actually uses commercial clay to create the pottery pieces that look as if they were made out of the river stones he described.
“It’s trompe l’oeli … a trick of the eye,” he said, as he walked up to a table, took a thin wire and cut a hunk of clay from a large block and began wedging it – hitting it against a table and smacking it around a bit.
Then Arrington placed the slab of earth on his potter’s wheel, sat down in front of it, dipped his hands in some water and proceeded to let them glide across what would become his latest creation. At the touch of his wet, clay-gloved hands, the lump of nothingness began to take form.
At this point he made grooves in the clay and filled the groves with colored slip (colored clay). Finally he scraped off the extra slip, leaving the colored slip just in the grooves, to create a symmetrical form with parallel lines.
“For me, this stage represents the way nature stratifies sediments before any tectonic distortion, for example, the desert in the Southwest,” he said, before going to the next step where he removed the still-closed form with the parallel lines from the wheel, and began the altering process. Here he used a wooden paddle to slowly alter and distort the shape and lines of the piece.
“This stage represents the tectonic and erosional forces that forge the stratified parallel layers of sediment into the sensual forms of the river stones,” he said.
The last step is about adding “necks and/or lips, or dishing-in, or otherwise completing the forms” to create the finished vases, bowls, fountains, etc., Arrington explained.
“The circular nature of repeating the tectonic processes using clay, which is itself, part of the larger rock-cycle process, is a constant source of reflection and inspiration,” he said.
However, Arrington maintained a full-time job as a graphic artist, while also continuing to develop his ceramics, until two years ago, when he was able to quit his day job and dedicate all of his working time to his calling.
He said he remembers the day it became clear to him that pottery would be his future. “I was doing a bachelor’s of arts and in that first afternoon sitting down doing pinch pots, it hit me: This is what I am going to do for the rest of my life,” said Arrington, who has since been published in several magazines, most recently in “American Craft” magazine and who will be opening his studio to the public during ARTrails, slated for the second and third weekends in October.
Willow LaLand-Yeilding
Healdsburg’s talented painter Willow LaLand-Yeilding will also share her works at ARTtrails (see image, right).
LaLand-Yeilding had her path cut out for her at a young age, when her parents, both artists, bought her first professional set of paints when she was just 10-years-old.
“I would come home from school and put in about three hours of painting. One of the neat things about my childhood is I was in a studio with 20 other artists,” LaLand-Yeilding said.
At 12 years of age, her work hung inside a gallery located in Nevada City, which took some of her paintings to the New York Artexpo. At 19, her work was published in a book and it was about that time that she also started entering art festivals on her own.
Then in the early 2000s, LaLand-Yeilding put her brushes aside and focused on creating a winery – Yeilding Wine – with her husband. Soon after, they started a family.
But this artist, who uses a Dutch-Flemish technique which involves putting bright colors underneath her realistic colors to give the paintings twice the amount of depth, didn’t let her paints or her talent dry up.
In 2011, she started showing her work and became the resident artist at Just For You Gallery in Healdsburg. She is currently working toward opening her own gallery, hopefully sometime this year, said LaLand-Yeilding, who today has collectors throughout the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, Hong Kong, England, Czech Republic, Holland and Russia.
“For me, (painting) nourishes the soul and when I go for long periods of time without painting, a part of me starts to panic. I think it is what I was meant to do in this life,” LaLand-Yeilding said. “The wonderful thing about art is what you get to share with other people, and the stories and their relationships to the painting, and that’s where our paths cross.”
LaLand-Yeilding teaches art classes at Just For You gallery in Healdsburg from 4 to 7 p.m. every Thursday. For more information, call her at 322-8861.
