Www.SwinkShop.com offers releases of new work as they become available for purchase. For sure, there will be a new batch of Wallies and other ceramics on October 9th to kick off Portland Open Studios (my 15th year!) and International Clay Week Open Studios.
If you're local to the Portland area, you can opt to type in a code at checkout to save shipping costs and come by the studio to pick up your purchases.

Add your name to my mailing list: eepurl.com/oElav to hear about upcoming shows and workshops. When you click on the link and type in your email address, make sure you click on "add contact to your address book" so that my emails don't end up in the spam folder.

This year the event takes place the second and third weekends of October, but studio visits will be virtual and art will be sold online. I have a brand new online shop, www.swinkshop.com that will be stocked for an October 9 kickoff. If you're local you'll have the option to type in a discount code to save on shipping and instead come and pick up your purchases by appointment. We'll make it work and I think it'll be fun!

This video details the decorating process on a piece titled "Carrot". Hope you like it!

A very quick demo with original music by my son, Bearsykins.

The best of the best in the Alberta Arts District.

89 Oak Street
Ashland, OR 97520
My work was featured August 2019 along with the paintings of Alison O'Donoghue. yay!

Here's a review of the 2017 show:
www.dailytidings.com/news/20170810/koch…

Next time you're visiting the Oregon coast, don't miss Rowboat Gallery. A stunning space with an outstanding collection of art. 34950 Brooten Road in Pacific City.

The Art Beat folks were here filming for a segment that aired in October 2013 and which has since aired on PBS affiliates across the country.
In this TV segment, I failed to thank my mentor-teacher, Coeleen Kiebert, for the immeasurable contribution she has made to my creative life. She invited me to teach using her creative process methodology, an approach I use in my own sculptural work and have taught in workshops since 2000. It is a rare thing when one person can influence so many others so profoundly in such a positive, life-affirming way, and Coeleen is such a person. She has had thousands of people in her classes, wrote and published "All of a Sudden: The Creative Process", and continues decades of work making, studying, and teaching art, creative process and the understanding of creative personality.

This is without a doubt the best ceramics video I've ever seen. It focuses on process: how she observes her environment for inspiration, her amazing documentation (think image journal/sketchbook), how she takes inspiration and transforms it through sketching into brilliant ideas in her own oeuvre (vocabulary & style), and some of the methods she uses, including sprigging and coiling, and adding hand-formed details. She talks about trusting the process and letting it inform her. And talk about test tiles!

This excellent article talks about a study of how depressive patients working in clay made sculptures associated with their significant life experiences, loved ones, or embodied inner self-representation. The study measured various aspects of emotion regulation, like positive and negative mood, and interactions between cognition and emotion and found that participants had lower levels of depression and improved daily functioning, general mental health and well-being.

I can't read Chinese, but I like the look of it!

Here's the online version of the article, "The Stories Within", written by Carolyn Hazel Drake.

During October 2013 Portland Open Studios, a group of University of Oregon Journalism students came to my studio and interviewed me for this short video. I think they did a great job!

Coeleen eloquently describes her ceramic work over the decades and how she uses it for self-discovery.

This excellent video provides a quick look into the inspiration, intent and process of Alisa Looney's sculpture and enamel work.

Peter produced this for his senior video project in 2005.

Check airbnb.com for listings.

My friend, painter Alison O'Donoghue offers a room in her SE Portland home:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/16554899?&s=41&ref_device_id=75c52f723488c450781ee3392836dcc468f73836&user_id=109001309&_branch_match_id=426051198377962936

My friend, Carole Murphy, offers an apartment in SE Portland:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/9729850

Art lover Terry Rusinow offers two accommodations to choose from in NE Portland: a guest cottage and an apartment.
www.everettstreetguesthouse.com
503-830-0650
info@everettstreetguesthouse.com

Georgia O'Keeffe loved the motif of the unfurling stem/leaf and she seemed to zero in on it at the beginning and at the end of her painting life. It could be considered an essential mark of hers, what we talk about in workshops as a doodle.
This BBC documentary of her life is great.

Basquiat is one of my artistic heroes. This is a great video about him and his art.

Helpful info about how to make tiles that will stay flat—an OPA workshop with Cathi Newlin and Dawn Panttaja.

Born in Stockholm in 1862, Hilma af Klint began her artistic career as an academy-educated painter of naturalistic landscapes and portraits. Influenced by the spiritual movements and scientific discoveries of her era, however, af Klint soon strove to express abstract concepts beyond what the eye can see. She began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. Yet while many of her better-known contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings largely private.

"Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future," the first major solo exhibition in the United States devoted to the artist, is on view October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Learn more at www.guggenheim.org/hilmaafklint

My mentor Coeleen Kiebert (M.S., UCSC) discusses the archetypal meaning of shrines, temples & cathedrals.