LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — On a recent cool, crisp autumn morning I visited the Cobb Mountain Art & Ecology Project at 9700 Rockys Road, Loch Lomond, in Lake County for their fall open house. The drive is country-road curvy but remains beautiful after wildland fires of the past once swept over the mountains.
Cobb Mountain Art & Ecology Project is an 80-acre facility in the middle of a bucolic pine forest.
The air is perfumed with the scent of the trees, and your steps are muffled in the quiet of the woodland setting as you make your way to the open house. Here both gas and electric kilns were being unloaded and wooden display shelves stacked with lovely, earthy ware. Students and potters, guests and dogs were all abuzz with the goings-on as they prepared to open the fall event on Nov. 22. (The event is repeated in the spring.)
Beginning that same day, works by all of the current artist residents as well as that of Scott Parady, the owner, will be selling online. Artists include Sydney Ruckdeschel, Lucas Schick, Casey Beck, Kade Helin-Burnette, Deepa Bhandari, Harry Cassell, Jasper Summers and Karley Deets. Some artist residents also maintain online shops. Sign up for the Cobb Mountain Art & Ecology emailing list here to be notified about new workshops and pottery sales.
A little heads-up: Parking is a bit tight, so come early. If you are or know of an aspiring potter, you might want to consider the residency program. The application process can be found on the CMAEP website.
“It takes patience to follow the road of life, which leads in the right direction.” — Beatrice Wood
Local potter Scott Parady founded the CMAEP in 2006. Between CMAEP and running the ceramics program at California State University, Sacramento, he keeps quite busy.
Parady specializes in wood-firing ceramics and regards regenerative land stewardship as his duty. Here is where he encourages the biodiversity of the lands and supports a healthy and supervised fire cycle in the forest.
He constructed the CMAEP facility, which includes small cabins for the artist residents and a 2,000-foot covered anagama kiln area.
An anagama kiln is a traditional Japanese kiln whose idea was incorporated from ancient Chinese firing methods.
Parady’s anagama is 22 feet long and is wood-fired for up to eight days, two times annually, using wood gathered off the property which doubles as a way to mitigate fire on the mountain. Firing a kiln with this process requires special finesse. Teams are assigned to take shifts so that while some watch the kiln, others split the wood, cook meals and generally work where needed to ensure safety and success.
Excitement was in the air as the soda-fired gas kiln was unloaded. Pottery projects from most of the students were being carefully unloaded with gloves and handed down an assembly line of likewise-gloved potters who then gently placed the pots on the earth to cool. Soda-fired work requires a process where soda ash or sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) was introduced into the kiln’s peep-holes as the kiln reached a certain temperature. The soda is basically a glaze where the pottery surfaces are transformed by the vapors inside the kiln to produce stunning effects.
As a potter myself, I have questioned why I bother making cups and bowls on a wheel when anyone can purchase a similar mass-produced product in almost any shop. When I bumped into an old friend who exclaimed that my stoneware, wheel-thrown serving bowl was the favored dish at gatherings, I felt vindicated in my addiction to throwing pots. The flow of the creative process as I bend over a mound of wet, slippery earth poses a question each time I throw a new pot. The challenge to form something from that mass has the attractive quality of lifelong learning spun into it.
Travel, even in your own backyard on Cobb Mountain, is always enriching. I’m sure each of the potteries I have visited has had an influence on my pottery. When I visited the Museo Ceramica in Tenerife, the Canary Islands, I discovered immense, ancient storage pots that were more than 6 feet tall. Pots for every use seemed to speak stories to me as I wandered through the museum. While visiting Japan on our Middletown Unified School District’s cultural exchange years back, we were honored to visit a village with numerous working potteries. The language barrier drifted away as we could all speak the language of pottery and its many forms and uses.
I’m looking forward to the spring open house and sale on May 30 and 31. Time is a wheel that takes us around our neighborhoods and the world to learn of the many interwoven ideas around craft, art-making and ceramics. The time it takes to learn a craft like pottery is long, but maybe it’s as Beatrice Wood, who was a centenarian potter, said, “It takes patience to follow the road of life, which leads in the right direction.”
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Kathleen Scavone, M.A., retired educator, is a potter, freelance writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora and Fauna Tour of a California State Park,” “People of the Water” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She loves hiking, travel, photography and creating her single panel cartoon, “Rupert.”
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This article comes at the perfect time, painting such a vivid pictur of community and craft. The way you describe the forest air and muffled steps just creates such a beautiful atmosphere. It really makes me wonder about the specific ecological practises alongside the art. What an incredible blend of nature and human creativity.