[Studio Potter Magazine] Studio Potter features Cynthia Bringle

[studiopotter-admin at studiopotter.org]

The featured ceramic artist in the next issue of Studio Potter Volume 
31 No. 1 is Cynthia Bringle, potter teacher and mentor. In the extended 
archival interview entitled "The Pot is a Mood of Many Hues," Cynthia 
describes her work and her underlying philosophy of life.

This well-known and dedicated potter living in Penland, North Carolina 
is widely admired in America for beautiful functional pottery as well 
as for her teaching and mentoring. Her association with Penland School 
has been long-standing, as is her deep emersion in the culture and 
history of the Southern Highlands.

In a recorded conversation with Gerry Williams, Cynthia said: "I 
started off as a painter. I consider painting as an important part of 
my work, the sense of line, design and pattern....I use fine liner 
brushes. Sometimes I use glaze over glaze. I love to decorate plates 
and platters. Large decorated raku wall pieces are very fluid in 
nature; I call them 'Wall Paintings."'

Cynthia describes her early start at the Memphis Academy of Art where 
she first took a short course in clay and found herself intrigued and 
fascinated. She took courses at Haystack School in Maine with leading 
potters such as M.C. Richards, Toshiko Takaezu, and Ed and Mary 
Scheier. Meeting Dan Rhodes in Haystack enabled her to become accepted 
at Alfred University where she studied with Robert Turner and Ted 
Randall. After Alfred University she returned to North Carolina and 
began teaching at Penland School and helping the director Bill Brown 
develop the ceramics program. Now she lives permanently in Penland and 
works at her studio which is a mecca for visiting artists and students.

She built a gas car kiln, a wood-fired kiln, and a raku kiln. She likes 
firing anagama kilns and favors the way the flame licks around the pot 
and deposits ash. "I like never being quite certain about the final 
results," she says, referring to form and what happens to it in the 
firing. She loves to make covered jars of all kinds, jars on feet, jars 
without feet, jars for kitchen counters, jars that are cylindrical and 
bulbous.

"I think when you look into history," she says, "you can see that our 
pots will last. What has remained in history is largely clay. So I just 
hope to keep on doing what I'm doing now, and pass on the information 
in my life. I teach a few classes. For the last few years I've been 
trying every year to take one course at the Penland School, leaving my 
studio and doing something new such as pastel painting. I've had a 
great time and it enriches my own work."

Cynthia likes to think about why she makes pots. "A pot is for 
daffodils, or it is a porridge pot, or a pot for pills. Pots are to 
give away, to keep, to touch and hold, to feel the curve of earth and 
sky. A pot is a mood of many hues, but most of all a pot is to use."

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