Nine years ago, Ash and I cast off on a great adventure. We quit our jobs and went on the road with our cantankerous two-year old, Ivan, in tow. Also in tow was our sweet little 13’ Scamp - a camper that was our home for nine months and one that still brings a smile to our face when we see them on the road. Our dream was simple: sell some art and see the country as a family. Rat race be damned! We were gonna make it.
And we did, God-willing. Neither of us has been forced to get jobs over those nine years outside of the occasional side hustle (my favorite was our brief sojourn into selling solar eclipse glasses circa 2016). That is, until now. Yes, folks, I got a job.
Okay, okay. That hook was a bit misleading, but technically, I am on a work schedule and counted on to work a shift. Jeff Blandford, a local artist, approached me about putting my work in his gallery in Saugatuck, and I was humbled but hesitant. Ash and I had never felt like galleries were a good fit for my work since the stories behind the paintings are a big part of their allure. But after more prodding from Jeff, we figured we’d give it a shot and I hung my work in a gallery for the first time in years. Part of our agreement is that I’ll work a few hours in the gallery most weeks, telling visitors to Saugatuck about my work and sharing my enthusiasm for Jeff’s many creations.
I’ve always been drawn to dichotomous characters and Jeff Blandford is a prime example. Jeff is, on one hand, a genuinely nice fella but beneath his charming facade lies a mad scientist of glassblowing and ceramics. His gallery is a testament to his wildly experimental creativity and relentless curiosity: there are moon pots mimicking the lunar surface, glow-in-the-dark glasses that illuminate in green and blue, clay pots made from clay he hand dug out of the ground of his property, ceramic plates that you can draw on with laser-pointers; the list goes on.
Work, work, work.
I’ve been a fan of Jeff’s work since first coming across it shortly after moving to Michigan in 2017. He has a wonderfully whimsical approach to his ceramic forms. The vases feature elegant elongated necks and this is counterbalanced will by his use of simple, modern, high-contrast stripes. It was these vessels that first drew me in.
The Jobs of Yesteryear with Jeff Blandford vases.
Eventually, I discovered his raku pottery. Raku is an approach to pottery first developed in Japan and rooted in Zen Buddhist Masters, who used it for their teaware. The raku process involves taking a very hot pot straight out of the kiln and utlizing this heat to ornament the outside of the pot. Two processes that Jeff uses are horse-hair and crackle.
For the horse hair raku pieces, Jeff drapes horse hair over the red-hot pot, essentially painting with smoke as the carbon from the hair is burned into the unglazed ceramic surface. The end result is a creamy pot adorned with wonderfully wild, gesticulation lines that are reminiscent of blackened blood vessels snaking across the entire surface. They look like tiny rivers of smoke coalescing across a milky gray earth.
The horse hair pieces are enchanting but my latest obsession is the crackle raku pots. For this process, Jeff puts a glaze (thin layer of glass) over the pot before putting it in the kiln. As before, it is heated and pulled out of the kiln when red-hot. The surface is rapidly cooled using water, and this sudden change creates thousands of micro-fractures in the glass glaze. Still blazing hot, the pot is then plunged into a bath of sawdust, again creating smoke that fills the just formed micro-fractures. The end result is a glossy surface divided into thousands of tiny spaces, as if viewing a gray-scale map of farmland from hundred miles up. The lines are less wiggly on these pots than the horse hair pieces and I think it’s this bit of angular anchoring to the style coupled with the beautifully elongated form of the pot that has made these raku pots my new favorites.
The Jobs of Yesteryear with the crackle (top) and horse hair (bottom) raku pieces.
The final process that mad scientist artist Jeff Blandford has discovered is called Backyard Glass. The shores of Lake Michigan on our side of the state are lined with endless sugar-sand beaches. It is this sand and these beaches that first drew us to the area and are the anchor of our outdoor joy. Over a few years of experimentation, Jeff took this very sand and figured out how to make his very own glass with it.
Sand is primarily made of silica which, when melted down at very high heat (over 3,000 degrees F) and combined with a couple of other simple elements (soda and limestone), becomes translucent glass. Jeff figured out this process and expected a slightly muddy-colored glass when using our local sand. However, to his delight the glass made from our sand is a beautiful calming shade of blue-green, a faint turquoise hue that perfectly captures the beauty of our lake. The blue coloring results from the iron content in the sand and Jeff said it was quite a delight to discover. From what I can tell these are the aha moments that fuel Jeff’s creative fire: the allure of an amazing new discovery.
Backyard Glass birds and pumpkins in the background.
As you can tell, I’m a big fan of Jeff Blandford and as far as jobs go, it’s a breeze and the hours fly by as I answer emails between customers stopping by to peruse. So the next time you’re in Saugatuck, stop on by the Jeff Blandford Gallery on Butler St. I might even be there working a shift. Or if you’re from further afield check out his website: https://jeffblandford.com/, and see what the mad scientist has been cooking up in his kilns.
Jeff Blandford Gallery | 240 Butler St. Saugatuck, MI | https://jeffblandford.com/