People ask me why I make pottery when everyone agrees the highest and best use of silica is in the manufacture of microchips for computers. I do it because it’s meaningful work that connects me to the essence of life. The clay I shape comes from ancient mountaintops washed down into stream beds over millions of years of rainy days. When my bones have crumbled to dust, and the bytes in this website are unintelligible, archaeologists yet unborn will excavate my studio and find pieces of pottery with my stamp on them.

I was the kid in high school who hid out in the ceramics studio. I went to gallery openings and haunted the second floor landing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they keep the Chinese porcelains and the Japanese stoneware. I won the studio art prize my senior year, and went on to apprentice with my teacher Tom White in Northfield, Massachusetts and study with Mary Risley at Wesleyan University. 

After college, I became a newspaper reporter, which now looks like a decision to go into the buggy whip business in 1899. In 2001, I was between jobs, and my friend Danny Pearl got killed in Pakistan. I decided life was too short not to do what I really wanted. I sat back down at the wheel and learned to fire kilns in a year of study with Jim Dugan at the now sadly defunct Vermont Clay Studio. I decided that if Paul Gauguin could quit his job to become an artist at 37, so could I. But instead of leaving my wife, two small children and two large dogs and going off to Tahiti to drink myself to death, we all moved back to the Berkshires and established the Daniel Bellow Pottery in Great Barrington in 2002.

I exhibit in local galleries and teach at the Great Barrington Waldorf High School and IS183 Art School of the Berkshires. Reluctant to turn in my reporter’s license, I still write freelance for Berkshire Living, Orion Magazine and WFCR Five College Radio. In the summertime, I fire wood kilns with my friends Joy Brown, Sam Taylor and Mark Rowntree.

Decorated with works from Sweetheart Gallery

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Phone: 845-810-2732
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