Since our retirement from formal teaching, we traveled to Korea many times and have gained much more insight into their amazing ceramic forming and decorating processes as well as the use and design of Korean ceramic tools. Because of this and a lifetime of being as much educators as ceramic artists, we sometimes feel wistful about our retirement. In part these workshops help to fill that need to share what we have learned.
I mentioned tools and want to address that issue. I have always made tools. When I began ceramics, now more than fifty years ago, we dug clay from the mountains of central Pennsylvania, mixed it with our feet and built kerosene fired kilns from the bricks we found in an abandoned brick yard.* So tools were a natural part of being with clay.
In our Korean Ceramic workshops, we use the tools I had used when studying with the Asian masters and with Kenneth Beittel who had worked in Japan. I have also designed tools in the Korean tradition. Some of my tools are patented.
Because the tools we use are so helpful and expand one’s abilities in natural ways, our workshop students wanted to buy the tools they were using. Sure, I tried to have them make their own but the next thing we knew we were in the ceramic tool business - at least marginally. That is how Dragon Claw Tools was born. Or more precisely that is how it was conceived. Although we have sold many tools to participants in our workshops and have a name, logo and great tools that seem to do the job better than what is currently available, our tool company is still in incubation. We still use our tools in our workshops and make them available there at very reasonable prices. Someday we may expand that business.
