In fact, established potter Abby O'Connell didn't know what she was tapping into when she held a series of dinner meetings in February of 2000. She ended up creating a veritable creative revolution in this area.

O'Connell simply brought a few potters together in her home to discuss the idea of a ceramics guild that would collaborate with a city-run studio and kiln. A similar model in Walnut Creek had inspired O'Connell, and she wanted to put the idea to work in her hometown.

While the city of Sunnyvale declined to participate, she charged ahead, and in January of 2001, the Orchard Valley Ceramic Arts Guild held its kickoff meeting. Since then, the guild has counted 181 members in three years and attained nonprofit status.

What holds them all together is rich, sticky, slimy, gooey clay that can be molded into just about any shape or size and glazed with endless finishes, but there is much to learn, and there are some in the area who've got the skills and experience to share.

"Artists need support to be successful, and the best support comes from other artists," O'Connell says.

In fact, two teachers in the area are internationally known potters who each found their own way into the art and who are passing their knowledge on to anyone who wants to learn. And their students are making their own mark in the art world, showing that while ancient ceramic pieces fill natural history museums around the world, the spirit of their creators seems to have gathered in the South Bay area.

Barbara Brown

Residents in Sunnyvale's Lakewood Village neighborhood might not know they have an internationally renowned ceramic artist in their midst, but they might have an idea of where she lives. Barbara Brown's '60s modern ranch house serves as just one of her galleries. Brown has exhibited in arenas from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow to the Wayne Center for the Arts in Wooster, Ohio. Most recently, she has stuck to the Bay Area with shows at the Gallery House in Palo Alto.

But even her temporary showings can't compete with her home. Her front stoop and backyard showcase an extensive sculpture garden. The walls and rooms inside are filled with pieces she's collected from all over the world, stacked on shelves like the storage space of a museum. "You have to find something that makes your heart happy," she says.

That's exactly what she did in 1961. She and a neighbor split babysitting duties, but their husbands would occasionally watch the children while the two took art classes. One instructor suggested that Brown try clay, and she was bitten by the pottery bug and hasn't looked back. "It takes you over, and that's a common thing with potters," she says. "I'd do it for nothing."

Luckily, she doesn't have to. She has her own backyard studio, complete with a low-fire kiln, thanks to her husband, Charlie. "He poured the concrete and bought the wheel. Next time, he'll marry a jeweler. There'll be less to carry," she says with a laugh. There she crafts plates that run $50­60 and wall tiles that go for $395. The income from these provides a nice secondary income in her husband's retirement.

Charlie's position as a mechanic with United Airlines also provided Brown with one of the more exotic aspects of her career—the ability to fly anywhere for free. This allowed her to become a pottery ambassador around the world. Her first international experience was at the World Craft Conference in Japan in 1978.

The conference jump-started a whole phase of globe hopping. In 1982, Brown organized a potters' tour to China, and every few years, heads to similarly far-flung places like Thailand and Guatemala with groups of her peers. Brown ventured to Uzbekistan in 1989, and later entertained a delegation of Russian potters who visited De Anza College, where she teaches.

The international ceramics community has also come to her via conferences held in the Bay Area.

Meeting potters from various backgrounds has affected Brown's own work, which is characterized by unadorned, sleek plates and vases done in porcelain and slate. "My message is that we all need a moment of tranquility," she says. "The black lets the fruit and the flowers sing." A tip from British potter Colin Pearson, who Brown counts as one of her favorite artists, has led her to try adding shots of gold to her plates.

Brown provides similar encouragement for her own students. She teaches seniors through Sunnyvale's Creative Art Center and De Anza College. "I get high on teaching," she says. She has also provided advice to fellow members in the Orchard Valley guild—at the Nov. 11 general meeting, she demonstrated such potting materials as drums and slips.

Linda Mau

Fellow guild member and potter Linda Mau shares Brown's enthusiasm for teaching. "I've been teaching over 20 years, and I get so much more encouragement and ideas for my own work when I'm teaching than during the summer," she says. Mau, a Saratoga resident, teaches hand-building and wheel-throwing classes at De Anza College.

Despite a background that involves exhibits all over the Bay Area, Mau insists upon original work from her students that taps into themselves. "They want me to tell them what to do," she says. "I don't want clones." Every quarter, she hosts a potluck for her students at her home, where many of them see her work in person for the first time. "I never finish any of my own work in class," she says.

After teaching pottery classes in various venues, including Sunnyvale's Parks and Recreation Department and West Valley College, Mau now finds her teaching home at De Anza. "A lot of art teachers don't tell you how to do anything because they're focused on the artistry," she says. "I tend to focus on the process and developing technique and creativity. You can't play jazz until you know the scales."

Mau attended UC-Berkeley as an English and history double major with the intent to teach. There was an art studio in a classroom building basement where she would watch artists work. One time, she got some clay and tried it on a pottery wheel, simply imitating another artist in the studio at the time. "I would go there when the reading became too much," she says.

After rethinking her teaching career, Mau returned to graduate school for an art degree. She began teaching in recreation centers and serving as an artist-in-residence several places, including the San Jose Unified School District.

These days, Mau can be found in De Anza's A quad every Tuesday and Thursday morning, giving a class-opening demonstration before letting her students loose. Oddly enough, Mau doesn't always practice what she preaches. "Personally, I don't do much wheel work," she says.

But she is intimately familiar with the various finishing techniques that give each piece of pottery its unique personality. The back wall in the studio where she teaches is covered in sample pottery pieces. Each type of clay is shown with each type of glaze and how each is affected by various temperatures, oxidizations and cooling techniques.

Every quarter, Mau assigns the basics to be completed by the time finals roll around: Students are responsible for creating a plate (which they use at the term-ending potluck), a covered container and a closed vessel. Mau also lays forth a creative challenge. In the fall quarter, it was a ceramic piece that evokes either "fish or fowl." "It gets that whole child-like, mud pie-itis thing going," she says.

The Students

On a windy Tuesday morning, the members of Mau's fall-quarter wheel-throwing class gather together for their final class period: A show and tell. Mau asked students to display their four assigned pieces as well as the first piece they made. She's not surprised that most conveniently forgot to bring along that potential embarrassment. "There are people who are so sure that they're not going to do it right," she says. "But with clay, if you don't like it, you squish it up and do it again. It's very freeing."

But still, as the class makes its rounds to everyone's table, some feel the need to explain mistakes. "You never apologize," Mau decrees. "You always say it was what you intended to do." She says that generally about 25 percent of her students are actual De Anza students of college age. The rest are professional women from other countries who can't work in the U.S. or retirees and housewives who come to try something new. "They either love it or they don't want their fingernails dirty," Mau says.

For this class, most seem to have fallen in love with the craft. Students ask their peers about choices they made and how to duplicate the effects. One young man with facial piercings complains about a glaze gone wrong. His friend produced a piece that garners oohs and ahhs: a covered pot with a beautiful jade-green finish save for a raw, stark black handle. "I've never seen Kabe's navy turn out that clear," Mau says. As it turns out, the student's favorite piece is the fish he made for the creative challenge, which he finished with nail polish.

Mau sympathizes with her students and their problems with glazes. "It's like riding a bike—your mother can tell you it's all about balance, but you don't know until you try for yourself," she says. She also acknowledges the difficulties of wheel throwing for beginners. "Right when you get nervous, you have to speed up the wheel."

For Liz King, therein lies the problem. The 81-year-old from Sunnyvale has been a potter for more than a decade, and even belongs to the Orchard Valley guild. She took classes with Mau in Sunnyvale, but only in hand-building techniques.

King just can't get into wheel throwing. "There's just too much clay!" she says. "I can't handle it all."

Another student, Karen Candlin of Menlo Park, also had some trouble: After firing, the top of her covered vessel is stuck. At Mau's direction, she taps on areas of the top that don't produce a hollow sound, trying to dislodge the stuck parts. Amid the chaos of the final class period, Mau's star student, Phyllis, arrives.

Late Bloomer

Lee is auditing Mau's wheel-throwing class through independent study.

She lives in the Willow Ranch Mobile Home Park in Sunnyvale and is another member of the Orchard Valley guild. Conveniently for her, many guild meetings are held in her development's activity center.

After retiring from social work in 1997, she decided to pursue her latent creativity. She took a class with Barbara Brown, thinking she would just give clay a try. "The process is as much fun as the finished product," she says. "I just became obsessed with it, though I do have a life beyond pottery," she says, grinning.

Since then, she has become more and more involved with the craft, selling pots for $250 to $300 and developing her style into something her teachers both openly admire. "I'm very inspired by natural forms and shapes," Lee says. For one of her first pieces, she pressed a piece of lace into clay, and was surprised at the result. "I thought that there's no way it could be that easy," she says.

Lee's inspirations don't stray far from that initial experimentation—she says she loves textures and sea motifs. She's also keen on challenging herself by piecing together a clay dress, and she's already purchased a fabric pattern to accomplish the task.

This need to stretch her creative boundaries keeps Lee investigating more as a student. She's audited a number of pottery classes at De Anza. It's mastery of the basic techniques that keeps her returning to the pros—things like how to keep clay from cracking. "I've never conquered raku," she says. "I'd love to get more sculptural and try bigger pieces."

The transition from dabbling student to somewhat-serious professional was not an easy one for Lee to make, but she's thankful to the Orchard Valley guild for helping her figure things out. "Once I began dipping my toes into it, I was quite successful, and it was a wonderful surprise, but the marketing bit was the furthest thing from my mind," she says. "The hardest thing is pricing, because you can't price your pieces based on how much you like them." She says the guild helps a great deal by holding at least one major exhibit per year with member-produced pieces.

Lee participated in the guild's yearly sale, held last October at the Ramada Inn in Sunnyvale. Her works have also appeared in various ongoing guild exhibitions, including the one at Roasted Coffee Bean in Cupertino. These kinds of displays help guild members reach more interested buyers, which helps newcomers like Lee make names for themselves. "It hardly qualifies as income," Lee says, "but it's wonderful that what I make that comes from my heart actually appeals to people."

The Guild

For all the diverse kinds of art out there, pottery seems to be one that has made a home in this area. A common love of clay in the Orchard Valley Ceramic Arts Guild keeps the group growing.

"This area is very ripe," Mau agrees, mentioning the various opportunities for classes at community colleges, recreation departments and independent studios. She knows one studio in the Cupertino area called The Clayground that's run by a fellow potter named Guangzhen "Po" Zhou, who holds classes that Mau says are filled by first-generation Chinese immigrants. "It shows how much people are interested in clay," she says. "It is such an enormously versatile medium."

O'Connell is still pursuing a studio location, one she hopes to operate independently in Sunnyvale within the year. A guild-dedicated kiln is just another way the area has become a fruitful bounty for pottery buffs. Where newbie artists might have been too nervous to strike out on their own before, there now exists an extensive network to help them realize their vision. But the location is just as vital and liberating to the veteran artist as it is to anyone. "This is the perfect place because we're free to do it here," Barbara Brown says.

For information on the Orchard Valley Ceramic Arts Guild or to subscribe to 'Greenware,' the guild's award-winning newsletter, visit http://www.ovcag.org.