Arizona Artist a Day: Day 44:Farraday Newsome and Jeff Reich (Indigo Street Pottery)

Website: www.farradaynewsome.com

Farraday Newsome and Jeff Reich

Biography

Farraday Newsome grew up in the redwood forest of coastal California. She is the daughter of George Newsome, a painter, potter and dinnerware designer who earned his ceramics degree at New York State University, studying with the late Daniel Rhodes.

Farraday received her BA in Biology (University of California at Santa Cruz, 1976) and her MA in Art with a Ceramics Emphasis (San Francisco State University, 1987). She currently lives in the Sonoran desert of Arizona with ceramic artist and husband Jeff Reich. Together they run Indigo Street Pottery in Mesa, Arizona.

Farraday’s subject matter is drawn primarily from nature and the emotional allusions and metaphors found in nature. Her color work celebrates the light and exuberance of day, while her black-and-white work delves into the shadowy, more emotionally complex realm of night and darkness.

Farraday is a widely exhibited artist whose work can be seen in such galleries as Plinth Gallery (Denver, Colorado), Santa Fe Clay (Santa Fe, New Mexico), and the Katie Gingrass Gallery (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Her work is included in many collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Wustum Museum of Art in Racine, Wisconsin, the Prague Museum of Decorative Arts in the Czech Republic, the Ohio Crafts Museum, and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Her work has also been featured in many books and magazines.

Artist Statement

I am an Arizona ceramic artist working with low fire glazes on red terra cotta clay. I usually work within the format of the vessel, exploring ideas of fertility, time, and regeneration. I have an abiding interest in developing a painterly glazed surfaces on my ceramic forms.

I am drawn to the rich, translucent quality of color and light I get by layering various colored glazes, which I paint on with a brush. I start with an undercoat of of either white or black glaze. This sets up a general light or dark atmosphere. I then develop imagery with layers of brushed, colored glazes on top of the white or black glaze base coat. When the brushwork is finished I sometimes use a needle tool to draw lines through the glaze layers for further depth and texture.