LOWER PRICE FOR 2 SUMMER CLASSES

A savings of $30. All the classes are still the same six week that I always teach. Nothing else has changed, just a lower price until the September when it goes back to $230 to help fight the high cost of heating fuel.

We now have 12 instructional videos on our website (more to come) hosted by Youtube, so if you have a smartphone or iPhone they can be viewed while you work. Very handy, if it is a open studio day and I am not around. Bring head phones. First class starts May 23rd. Ends on the 27th of June. 2nd class starts July 11 and ends August 15. Next regular price $230 pottery classes start on September 12th!

See you in the pottery studio!

A six week course studying the fundamentals of wheel thrown stoneware pottery. Each student is provided with a potters wheel in our studio near Big Lake, Alaska. The classes are limited in size to 8 students to provide an excellent teacher to student ratio. Each student receives highly individualized instruction to shorten the learning curve.

The January snows have been deep and often. Today the wind is howling madly around our compound’s doors, the temperature is around +10°. In our youth we faced the winter with cords of wood stacked and more ready for splitting. It was hard to keep that old homesteaders log cabin warm using a barrel stove. It had three rooms plus a bathroom that never worked which I turned into a sauna with wood heat at first, then an electric sauna heater. Then later it became our son’s bedroom with his bed up in the air and storage draws beneath and a secret door. Carvings of dragons adored his bed and squirrels lived in the between the logs and the interior walls I put in to make it warmer. But the squirrels found there way in through the gaps in the old cabins corners and made it their home storing bags and bags of dog food between the logs and the interior wall with insulation. They would visit with David outside his small window next to his bed and were his friends.

Life here was good, though it took a lot of work making it through the long winters, but it was a challenge living at the end of a muddy road before all the development came. Came it did with a vengeance. Turning this spot in the road called Wasilla into the “big box store” nightmare that it is today. If I were a younger man, I would move to a more remote area of the state. But I am too old now to start over and do all of the building that we did on our place here. We built this whole place with our own hands, the walls, the windows, the roof, & the doors.

As we got older we went from heating with wood to heating with coal, which was much easier to keep all of the stoves going. But that involved a lot of hauling of coal to the stoves and constant feeding and disposing of the ashes on a daily bases. So older and older we became, and the price of fuel oil was not much then, but when we had to take care of Vickie’s elderly mother who had dementia, we went switched to oil heat to keep her room warm. She lived in one of the rooms in the old cabin which was Vickie’s studio with her large floor loom in the main room along with lots of art, journals and books.

So all this came to be, after we returned home, rather broke from our sailboat cruising adventures from Seward, Alaska to the Sea of Cortez and on to Hawaii and home to our port of Seward. Ahh the Sea of Cortez! How I loved it there. I long to return and sail where the wind is warm the days are hot and the nights cool. Visiting with other cruisers from all over the world, playing music, drinking margaritas, eating sushi and fresh tortillas. We are planning to sail again before we are too old, and become snow birds for part of the winter.

But back to the story from wood to oil.

Vickie’s mom caught her room on fire while trying to dry something, and the whole cabin went up in flames on a cold windy winters night. Vickie’s loss was devastating. Her mom survived, but Vickie had to find a home care facility where she lived until she died at 92yrs. By then, all of our heating stoves were converted Toyo’s.  A Toyo stove would not have caught on fire. I wish her mom’s stove had been a Toyo. It’s along story.

So, now-days the hardship is finding the money to pay for all the oil we use in our 4 Toyo’s stoves. We have put on a new roof for the pottery studio, with lots of insulation and this last fall had the roof of our living area sprayed with 4” foam and that has reduced our fuel use some. But what we spend on fuel per month, we could live well on a boat in Mexico, no problem. We are planning to live on a boat during part of the winter in our near future.

As some of you might know, I am waiting to get my right knee replaced, I had the left knee replaced last January 2011, but it still hurts a lot and I can not do lots of the things I used to take for granted. I feel like I have turned old over night. It’s a hard thing to accept. I have been creating some of the best pottery I have ever done in regards to shape, form, glaze and brush work. It has become a time for inner growth, to delve into the mysteries of one’s own being, to become more aware, to be one with the self. I am reading Jung and Tolle to help find the path to greater enlightenment. This is the true path in life, I feel. Working in the arts, brings me closer to my path. I can quiet the talking in my mind easier than before and feel the stillness surround me more, so something is working.

Thinking about working, I am getting ready for the summer season and I have put more “how to do it” lesson on my Youtube channel so that my students can review what I have showed them in class. If they have smart phones they can view it while in the studio on open studio days. The link to the tutorial videos can be found on the right side of this blog page & at the bottom of our main web site. Youtube has all of the lessons created so far. There will be more videos coming, but the basics are posted for anyone to view.

“I will not fear. Fear is the mind-Killer,I will face my fear, I will let it pass through me. Where the fear has gone there shall be nothing only I will remain”  Frank Hurbert/ Dune

On another note I have been making instructional videos to help my students remember what I have shown them in class. But not all of the videos have been added to our website.  You can see them on “YouTube” using their seach engine for “djmckenzie100″ & by selecting this link: BirchGrove Studios on YouTube.  There are nine or so available for viewing. They were all made using my smart phone at 720dpi so the quality is good.  This means you can use your “Magnifier Tool” on your computer, if it has one, to zoom in for a closer look. This works very well. More videos will be added as time goes on. I hope this will help out with the teaching process. We are also taking sign -ups for Jananuary classes and gift certicates are available as well. Sign-ups do not require any money at this time.

So, come out to see us and get a gift that keeps on giving all year long. A merry Christmas to all!!  Dennis and Vickie

I believed, I believed, I believed in what the Church taught me. I had not learned to think for myself. But a great restlessness was in my soul around 1965 and I left home at 17 to live with a couple of women I knew in their early 20′s who taught me much about life. I worked at odd jobs around the city (San Francisco) all the time looking for the meaning of life and for love. It was in the east bay that I found her, a mentor who would change my life. A playwright, director, a seeker on the road of life. She turned me on to works of Herman Hesse and Alan Watts and, most of all, Carl Jung  and his book “Man and His Symbols” which I have returned to time and time again through out my life. He believed that man’s purpose was to reach the “Self” which is a higher state of consciousness which exists in us all.

This was the true purpose of the hippie movement of the 60′s, we change ourselves we change the world. Many rejected the mass materialist culture of the times and the growing power of the military industrial complex in order to try to find real purpose in life.  As I wrote in my first blog, “there are only four questions of value in life and the answer to all is the same, love”.  Love we did try to find in all things and for awhile Camelot lived. But many just saw the outer trappings of a counter culture and missed the main point of being responsible for our own thoughts and deeds, trying to live close to the land, to feel the land’s power of love, casting off the puritanical morals of the past, seeding the ground work for woman’s liberation.

The hippie movement had very high ideals.  Most were lost on the mass media which only saw the “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll”. My mentor said to me one day “Denny, I see you becoming an artist someday and living an interesting  life in an interesting place”   What! Me an artist? I can’t draw! But she had planted a seed and after coming to believe that our purpose was to become aware, to gain more consciousness or enlightenment as the Buddha said, I thought to myself, “What endeavor expresses the life force more than any other or is closest to it? To me the answer was the “Arts”

I was into photography at the time and was shooting the Haight Ashbury scene (to view some of these photo’s go to photography on our website and take the link to photo.net where my portfolio is kept under different headings. Click on “The 60′s a personal view”) as well as roaming up and down coast of California shooting seascapes, enjoying the interface of land and sea. I took a class at City College in photography and tried to get into San Francisco State College where they had a good film school. But I found that I could not go to school and work full time. I was working as a computer operator at the time. So I dropped out.

For some reasonI had an interest in pottery and I can not remember why.  At every college in which I tried to take a class, they were always full because full time students had first pick.  So it was some years later, after many adventures that I found myself in southern California with my first wife living in Upland, that I found the local college had a summer course in pottery in which I enrolled. It was there that I meet my 2nd mentor, Lindley Mixon, the pottery instructor.

I became obsessed. By the time the class was done I had built my first kick-wheel from a kit.  Lindley taught me how to weld and to build kilns. We even got into glass blowing and built all the equipment ourselves from a book and taught ourselves to blow glass. It was a very exciting time for me, learning all these new things and to know this dynamic artist who gave me so much. He was a student of Paul Soldner and was there when they invented American Raku.

He longed to go back to Alaska where he had spent some time during statehood. I hated southern California and all the smog and also longed to return. Well, we did and its a long story and I’m not writing a book, but a blog on how did I get here, anyway. Well, I got here by following my bliss as Joseph Cambell put it. That’s the best advice I can give anyone. Am I closer to enlightenment by following the way of clay? Yes. I know there is no death.

“Your true evolution is not what you do out there. That’s secondary. Your
true evolution is to do with the arising of awareness in you as you
go about your life.”  -Eckhart Tolle

I have needed help from my friends for these last 20 or so months due
to bone on bone knee problems in both knees, no fun I can tell you.
One moment you are just fine the next your an old man with a handicap
sign to stick in your car window. What to do? Transform the pain into
your art. Take the power of the dark and blend it with the light. Try
to live more in the moment, not the past or the future. For these
things are not real only the Now. I have found that I have done my
best work in clay and painting over these last 20 months.

After an intense summer of making pots till I dropped. One would think I
might be rather burnt out. Well I guess I am from having all those
deadlines to make and at the time just wishing summer would end. But
now that it has I can pot at a slower pace feeling the joy of the
spinning clay and enjoy again the company of my students and take
pleasure in watching them get better and feel the stillness of
throwing.

Making pots is like playing music, I have done both, when you watch a master
it looks so easy. There are no grand jesters of movement except maybe
when centering large amounts of clay. But the rest is subtle movement
of fingers and hand and the pots just seem to spring forth into life
of there own accord. Keeping the hands steady is a key, learning to
use the fingers as very sen tools is also.

It takes strength and sensitivity, strength through leverage,
sensitivity by gaining control of the finger pressure points. I teach
through talking, showing and helping the student get the basics down.
This takes time.

“The Potter’s Dictionary of materials and Techniques” has this to say
about throwing “Throwing is a faster method of making pots than any
other method. It contains all the elements of a great skill: the
potter is in direct contact with his material. This reliance on
personal skill is its attraction for the individual potter today but
industry has almost dispensed with it and instead has turned the
process sideways into a mechanized system with complete loss of
individual expression.”

So a 64yr old potter must keep seeking growth, inner and outer. Tennyson
put it best.

“My Purpose Holds, To Sail Beyond the Sunset and the Baths of all the
Western Stars…..To Strive, To Seek, To Find and not to yield.”

I have never really thought that but there is something magical in
getting centered with the clay. How it slips through your hands and
seems to move without effort putting you in the “Now” sometimes
as a shape takes form from your hands. Many have tried it and many do
it. For fun or for money, I do it for both.

Trying to find that perfect form or just the right way a handle springs from a mug in a flowing arches that adds grace to the form. That’s what a lot of my students find after they get beyond the basic’s is a sense
of peace or being in the zone or the “Now” the place where time
stands still and all the chatter in your head slips in to the back
ground. Lots of disciplines do this. I have been doing it for 39
years, seems like a long time a real long time. I guess it is. Most
of it has been here in Alaska and I’ve watched the seasons come and
go.

Now another summer of hard work has past and the long dark winter begins. We are cleaning up the pottery showroom and stocking it with pots and Vickie’s jewelry and her pots. Yes she became a potter this last
summer.

We are planing an open house pottery sale for this December and hope you can come out and see us. Will let you know when in a future blog. We are also taking sign ups for new pottery classes in January 2012.

“There are only four questions of value in life. What is scared ? Of what
is the spirit made? What is worth living for and What is worth dying
for? The answer to all is the same… Love.”- from the movie Don
Juan DeMarco

Birch Grove Studios is a working studio and gallery for stoneware pottery, jewelry, fine art photography and art, located in Wasilla, Alaska. With over 38 years of experience, Dennis McKenzie & Vickie Cole own and operate the studio and gallery. Pottery classes are taught throughout the year in the wooded setting.

Find out more about the current pottery class schedule.»

We sell our work at fairs throughout Alaska, at our gallery and online through our Etsy Store.

Feel free to contact us to tour the studio, shop the gallery & visit with us. Sign up for our blog postings to stay informed. We look forward to hearing from you!

- Dennis McKenzie & Vickie Cole