About Ted Sowinski

I became a potter in the early '70s. I had a friend, John Spiteri, who was teaching himself how to make pots. I learned what I could from him, working in his studio in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago (aka, the Back of the Yards). It was a real struggle at the beginning. When you're first learning how to throw pots, they look pretty ugly. Then I took a few courses at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The teachers were very inspiring. I learned how to make goblets and picked up a few great glaze recipes. Around this time I also got a part-time job at UIC, teaching students how to throw pots in the student union crafts workshop. It was a pretty good deal for them because they only had to pay for the cost of the clay they used.

I spent a summer in Colorado at a live-in craft workshop. I did some of the grunt work in exchange for tuition. Here I met lots of other potters and helped to build and fire several kilns. This was a life changing event for me. I decided to go back to Chicago, save up some money, and start my own life as a potter. About a year later I moved back to Colorado and built a catenary arch kiln in the foorhills above Boulder. I designed it so it could fire on propane or wood (or both). Later I converted it to a salt-glaze kiln. The combination of wood fuel and salt-glazing produced some beautiful affects (see blue and gray salt-glazed mug and brown salt-glazed mug). Well, after about a year, I ran out of money. I had no business training and it was too hard to make pots and market them all by myself. I traded my kiln for a year's rent at a Boulder potter's co-op. I got a regular job and made pots part-time. This did not last too long because I still had the same problem - I didn't know how to market my pots. Then I found a full-time job throwing pots at a production pottery in Boulder called Carol Ann Pottery. I worked there until 1980. There were five or six other potters working there. All we did was throw pots -- other workers glazed pots, fired kilns, and filled orders. We had to make whatever was needed that day and the pots had to look like the ones in the catalog -- we couldn't just make whatever we wanted to. It wasn't very creative work but it was a good job and we learned how to throw really fast (we were paid by the piece). I thought this would be great training for whenever I went back to making my own pots again. But that never happened. By 1980 I was "burnt out". Making pots was not a joy any more. I was also tired of being poor. I decided to go back to school and become a computer programmer. I took a FORTRAN course back in 1969 and I enjoyed it. Now computers were becoming very hot. The IBM PC just came out. Everyone was talking about computers. There were lots of really good paying jobs for programmers. Twenty years later after marriage, a mortgage, a child, and a divorce I decided to try making pots again. I rented studio space in a pottery shop in Oak Park, Illinois and began making pots (keeping my day job writing Perl scripts). I was a little rusty at first, but it wasn't long before I was making pots that were better than ever. Then, in the spring of 2001 I met my current wife, Fran, at a neighborhood meeting (we were organizing to prevent the Village of Oak Park from building yet another parking garage). We were married on December 28th, 2002. Recently I moved my studio to the Riverside Arts Center, where we built a new sprung-arch natural gas kiln in the fall of 2003. I fired it for the first time in January, 2004. I am currently showing my work at three locations: The Riverside Arts Center, Ferencak Gallery, and Acme Art Works.