Visiting Sausalito
Ceramic Innovations: A Sausalito Tradition
Jun
Sausalito Pottery and Heath Ceramics are two of my favorite spots for ceramic innovations in Sausalito. Sausalito Pottery’s Lorna Newlin currently maintains studios in Sausalito and Oahu, Hawaii. When I visited her studio in the north end of Sausalito near MLK Field, Newlin was busy filling several wholesale orders. Her line of whimsical dog dishes was inspired by the drawing style of Sausalito’s own cartoonist, Phil Frank. I watched as she decorated the dishes with neat black lettering and a variety of dog designs to please different tastes. A curly-haired poodle came to life before my eyes under her expert hand, complete with lolling pink tongue.
Ceramic Innovations at Sausalito Pottery
Newlin was also working an order of dishes and plates for her Hawaiian market. Sea life from crab, to octopi, from turtles to starfish blossomed on the creamy ceramic. She achieves pleasing textures and variety with pastel washes of glazes and impressions from her “creatures” which were strewed about. Her sea life technique was inspired by the Goyotaku style of Japanese printmaking where a whole fish is inked and pressed onto rice paper. Designs are varied and surprising, and she is always experimenting with different colors and textures. By mixing her own glazes from mineral pigments, Newlin achieves a unique color palette. She also showed me a new line of free-form porcelain dinnerware with 18-carat gold rims, very simple and elegant.
About Lorna Newlin
Newlin has been creating pottery for over 25 years; she opened Sausalito Pottery in 2002, after leaving the corporate world. In Hawaii she draws inspiration from the sea life she sees in her dives. Newlin teaches classes for adults and children in her Sausalito studio where she has three pottery wheels, two kilns, and many shelves displaying her work. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Newlin’s studio and felt inspired to get busy working on my own ceramic designs again.
About Heath Ceramics
No trip to Sausalito would be complete without a visit to Heath Ceramics Factory Showroom. Founded in 1948 by Edith and Brian Heath, Heath Ceramics is a Sausalito institution. The current owners, Robin Patravic and Catherine Bailey, share the founders’ passionate commitment to handcrafted work and ceramic innovations. After buying Heath Ceramics in 2003, they injected new energy into the company, adding new products and expanding the business to showrooms in Los Angeles and San Francisco’s Ferry Building. They also opened a new tile factory and showroom in San Francisco in 2012. But with all the expansion, Heath has remained true to the vision of handcrafting products by skilled artisans in small runs. Working and weekend factory tours in Sausalito are available by appointment, if you want a true behind-scenes view.
Heath’s Early Years
After Edith and Brian Heath moved from Chicago to San Francisco in the early 1940s, Edith began making ceramics with little formal training. The ceramic innovations of her one-woman exhibit at the Legion of Honor in 1944 brought her to the attention of Gump’s department store. Gump’s then commissioned Edith to create an exclusive dinnerware collection. When retail orders started rolling in, the couple officially founded Heath Ceramics in Sausalito. Edith’s pieces for designed for a single kiln-firing at lower than normal temperatures. The results were extremely durable with beautiful and innovative glazes. Heath’s innovative work won many design awards and entered the collections of museums such as MOMA and LACMA.
Growing up with Heath Ceramics
Coincidentally, I grew up in a household eating and drinking from Edith Heath’s stoneware designs. My parents bought their first set of dinnerware in Manhattan in 1951 at a craft store called America House. The dishes they purchased to set up house were one of the now-classic Heath designs. On my recent visit to Heath, I met up with those same bowls, plates and coffee cups on display in a legacy showcase! So Heath’s designs always make me feel a bit nostalgic for all of my mother’s fabulous home cooking. My father was particularly impressed with the clerk’s demonstration of the plate’s durability, which involved bringing one down hard on the counter. He attempted to demonstrate this again at one of my mother’s early dinner parties. Unfortunately, he was a bit too enthusiastic and the plate ended up shattering. Fortunately though, they had purchased a large set that survived two children and over two decades of family dinners.
