My name is Daniel Bellow, and I make high-fire porcelain pottery for everyday use. I’m fascinated by the interplay of glaze and surface, and I try to push the physical limits of my medium to make pots that are light, strong and beautiful. A good pot should be as delightful to hold as it is to behold, and I welcome visitors to my studio, so they can touch for themselves.

Belloware – I can’t resist the word – is dishwasher- and microwave-safe, and with proper care  should last hundreds of years, just like the Chinese porcelain and  Japanese folkwares they keep on the second floor landing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I used to spend rainy Saturday afternoons. I use the same traditional glazes: shinos, celadons, temokkus and copper red, fired to 2,400 F in the gas reduction kiln I built in my backyard.

I won the studio art prize in high school, and went on to study with Mary Risley at Wesleyan University. I was studio apprentice to Tom White in Northfield, Massachusetts and worked at Earthworks Pottery in New York for a summer before I listened to my father, who said: “at least you’ll always have a pot to piss in,” and got myself a job on a newspaper.

Midway through an honorable if not particularly lucrative career in journalism, I decided that 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 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 The Berkshire Eagle, where I was an editorial writer for three years, Berkshire Living and other publications. To make ends meet, I work as a Realtor with Cohen and White Associates. Call me if you want to buy or sell a house.

 All profits from the sale of Daniel Bellow Pottery go toward paying the mortgage and grocery bills at 12 Benton Avenue, Great Barrington. Dinner sets and large and/or unusual pieces can be commissioned. I welcome inquiries and orders by email at  danielbellow@yahoo.com.