ARTISANS: NATURAL INSTINCT

In a late summer afternoon, ceramist Ellen Grenadier’s studio/gallery in a converted two-car garage in Monterey, Massachusetts, epitomizes the concept of “bringing the outside in.” It’s here, with the big garage doors open wide, sun streaming through several windows, and a gentle breeze blowing, that Grenadier has an unencumbered view of the flowers, trees, and lush green lawn as she sits hunched over her potter’s wheel, meticulously crafting one of her trademark mugs. Sunlight illuminates the plates, bowls, cups, and vases embellished with botanical themes in her showcase gallery, while two cats, named Seiji Ozawa and Yo-Yo Ma, saunter casually about. It’s no wonder Grenadier characterizes her pottery as “from the heart and from the earth.” Nature, she says, is her greatest inspiration.

 

Berkshire pottery enthusiasts will immediately recognize Grenadier’s work. In vibrant copper greens, soft cobalt blues, and iron-rich ambers, her functional dinnerware and decorative tiles are distinguished by imprints of leaves and flowers that curl along the edge of a bowl or swoop down the side of a mug. She often paints slip (wet clay) on pieces before glazing to create sensuously spiraled centers and soft edges, giving her work movement and flow. 

 

In a world of meals on the run, Grenadier’s work suggests ritual. Her pieces are a deliberate marriage of the artfully handmade and the appealingly accessible, stellar examples of form meeting function. “What I like most is making artful pottery that will be used every day—objects that bring the intimacy of the handmade into people’s homes and encourage us to stop and enjoy the experience of dining,” she says, over tea served at her kitchen table. The room is filled with her work, from mugs and salad bowls to a spectacular tile backsplash imprinted with fern leaves. 

 

A mistress of artistic reinvention, Grenadier has evolved her distinctive style over decades. Though born in Montreal, Grenadier grew up in the suburbs of New Rochelle, New York, trekking into Manhattan each Saturday for museum visits and drawing lessons at the famed Art Students League. “For years, that was my passion,” she recalls.

 

She majored in studio art at Connecticut College, and it wasn’t until her last year that she took a ceramics class—a medium she found very natural. After graduating, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, renting space in a communal house that had a ceramics studio in the basement. “I would do pottery in the basement, weld sculpture in the garage, and paint in the attic,” Grenadier says with a laugh. “I wasn’t drawn to anything but art.” But she knew she had to support herself, and pottery seemed the most practical of her artistic interests—especially given her love of beautiful dinnerware.

 

Grenadier started making functional pots and selling them from an old ice cream cart in Harvard Square. A grant from the Tiffany Foundation allowed her to apprentice at Monroe Salt Works in Maine, where she learned salt glazing and the business of production pottery. “And I really learned how to put on handles,” she claims.

 

Finding country life too isolating, however, Grenadier moved back to Cambridge in 1975 and helped found the Clay Dragon Studios cooperative in an old furniture factory. “That was kind of like my graduate school,” she maintains. “We helped each other learn, and it was great, but all-consuming.” During that time, Grenadier met and married another potter, John Campanale; when the Clay Dragon building was sold, Grenadier and her husband moved to Merrimac, Massachusetts, where he started a smoked fish business. Grenadier joined him in the business part-time, spending the rest of her hours working in her own two-story studio. 

 

Then came the first major change in her artistic style, as Grenadier began exploring inlaid colored clay, designing decorative tiles and murals for American Art Tile, Inc. She also produced pictorial tiles to create large-scale murals, including one on the wall of a bathhouse in Nantucket, which sports a whimsical underwater scene complete with a nude swimmer, fluid waves, and tendrils of seaweed that look as if they might sway with the pool’s current. It was during this time, in 1987, that her daughter, Nicole, now a senior at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, was born. 

 

Still, Grenadier felt isolated. “The community wasn’t working for me,” she explains. But the Berkshires were on Grenadier’s mind. “I had a friend I had visited out here a few times, and I think I had an unconscious intuition that it was the right mix of culture and country and people.” In 1990, she moved west, living for a year and a half in Housatonic, Massachusetts, before finding her current home in Monterey. “The house spurred in me a desire to take a risk,” she says. “And it’s been a perfect fit. I’m amazingly blessed to have landed here.” 

 

When Grenadier’s marriage with Campanale fell apart, she faced another pivotal watershed. “The divorce forced me to look again at what I wanted to do,” she says. She began to teach, becoming one of the first pottery instructors at Interlaken School of Art (now known as IS183 Art School of the Berkshires), and then the school’s ceramics director for a decade. 

 

“The beauty of Ellen’s teaching was that she nurtured everyone’s individual path,” says Vickie Lea, one of Grenadier’s longtime students. “She taught us the same basic techniques, but everybody went off in their own directions. I’ve never seen that before, and it was quite exceptional, being able to engage with each person where they were and where they wanted to go.”

 

Inspiration flowed in both directions. Through teaching, Grenadier began to broaden her artistic vision, again. “I was exposed to the work of all these students and began noticing glaze combinations I liked, getting way more information than I could generate on my own. I developed a huge palette of materials and possibilities. It really fired the imagination.” 

 

Grenadier’s most significant reinvention was inspired by time spent outdoors. “I’d been doing a lot of hiking in the Berkshires and seeing leaves pressed in mud,” she recalls. “The image stuck in my mind. One day, I picked up a leaf outside to demonstrate to students rubbing something in clay to create texture, and I pressed a leaf in a bowl. When it was fired, I really loved that bowl.… It evolved from there.” Now, she uses a variety of plant materials, collecting from spring to fall.

 

The distinctive slip details along the edges of her work were actually inspired by a mistake. “I love the fluidity of wet clay, and one day I was painting on some slip. A big glob came off the brush. I left it there, and it became part of my [process].

 

"Those techniques and the skillful use of only three glazes have allowed Grenadier to achieve a clearly defined aesthetic. “Every summer I go nuts when I see all the different textures and patterns that come with plants,” she says. “It’s frustrating.… Everything generates ideas in my head, more than I can keep up with. It’s a process of constantly observing, refining, incorporating. You really have to be present.”

 

In 1999, Grenadier married psychotherapist Michael Guthrie. On a trip to Seagrove, North Carolina, to visit Guthrie’s son, Chris, an aspiring actor, Grenadier had another artistic epiphany. “I was inspired to see all these open studios with potters selling their work on the spot,” she recalls, of discovering the area’s rich artistic community. Once home, she transformed her garage studio, adding a gallery, and opened it for business. “That was the scary part,” she admits. “It was a commitment.”

 

Though Grenadier maintains official gallery hours Wednesday though Saturday, she’s almost always open during the day (call first, in case she’s gone for a walk or on a quick trip to the store). Drop in, and you’re apt to find her deftly spinning a bowl or vase while listening to a lecture on tape about Buddhism or classical music. Or she might be methodically attaching handles to mugs or carefully dipping bowls into vats of glaze. The countertops are lined with pottery in virtually every stage of creation, from raw, wedged clay ready for the wheel to finished pieces hot out of the kiln. A casual visit can quickly become a lesson in the labor-intensive process of handmade pottery, and Grenadier is usually happy to show her technique and philosophy.

 

In addition to showing her work at venues across the country, Grenadier is represented by galleries around New England and in Philadelphia. “What attracted me to her work is the freshness of what she’s doing and the beautiful glazes she uses,” says Donald Clark, co-owner of the Ferrin Gallery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who has known Grenadier for more than a decade. “The little tricky things she does with the leaves and plant pieces is masterful, the way she uses botanicals to articulate and enrich the surface is really special.”

 

In addition to individual tableware, Grenadier also creates murals, tiles, and wall pieces, including custom orders for items like full dinner sets. “Ellen made us a table service, and it’s the only china we use day in and day out,” says New Jersey resident Delight Dodyk, whose family has summered in Monterey since the 1920s. “She really worked with us in designing what the tableware would look like, and it has that lovely natural green color that works perfectly in our summer home. It’s held up beautifully, considering the extended family and friends who use our house. It’s very sturdy stuff, and every piece is different. That’s the beauty of handmade things."

 

Clark says Grenadier is one of the hardest working artists he knows. She participates in half a dozen retail shows a year, including the Paradise City Arts Festival and CRAFTBOSTON, and she is one of thirty-four guest potters from fifteen states invited to participate in the prestigious Minnesota Pottery Tour. “This is a woman who’s very committed to what she’s doing and has been for thirty years,” he says. “She has such integrity. She’s stayed with her vision for what she wanted to do with clay, and you don’t always see that. The potter’s life is not always an easy one.”

 

Grenadier expresses an eagerness to move some of her ideas “off the mug” and work with larger, freer forms, using some of her trademark images to create wall pieces like “clay paintings.” Clark says, “Her work lends itself to pictorial [art] being seen as a painting. Her triptychs are very beautiful and they’ve been really popular. And you can take them off the wall and use them as platters.”

 

Grenadier seems to have found her ideal creative zone within self-imposed limitations. But still her imagination runs free. “Three glazes, two slips, a variety of shapes,” she says, “and you have endless possibilities.” [Oct. 2009]

 

Karen Campbell is a freelance writer and professional double bassist. She is a cultural correspondent for the Boston Globe.

 

THE GOODS

 

Open Wed.-Sat. 11-5

12 Tyringham Rd.

Monterey, Mass.

413.528.9973

 

437 North St.

Pittsfield, Mass.

413.442.1622