Art in Bloom 2026 - Chapter 4

 

Art in Bloom 2026 - Chapter 3

 

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Cheryl Keffer has mastered the rainy day scene with people walking along sidewalks by a lit window. (Last year there was a similar painting. But they are evocative of pleasant times, at least in my thinking!)

Art in Bloom 2026 - Chapter 2

 

Art in Bloom 2026 - Chapter 1

 

I captured the lovely docent, Dawn Wilson and my buddy Helen in the mirror.

Ladybug treasures

  

These pieces are just some that I made  and sold a lot to friends Marina and Charlie. They were great customers at the Black Mountain Tailgate Market for years.

Marina is a talented Native Flute musician, here's her webpage: https://www.marinaraye.com/ You can listen to many of her works there.

A couple of mugs made for Marina and Charlie. Then Charlie had a special order...and I did my best! At one point I did take photos of a big cup which also poured the water into his single cup coffee maker...so it looked like a big cream pitcher. But I can't find those photos today.

Sharing with Tom's Tuesday Treasures

Martha Grover

 Martha Grover's radiant porcelain is a splendid garden of shape, color, and movement. Her wheel-thrown and ingeniously altered forms evoke things organic and wonderful in nature from elaborate flowers to dancers twirling in billowing dresses to anemones and fishes dancing on a coral reef. This collection has gives us the impression of an orchard filled with juicy summer fruits. Her subtle surfaces bring intriguing texture to slick glaze surfaces that feel immaculately smooth in the hands. Fresh color fields interact with one another to make the pots shapes pop, and constellations of little dots punctuate and anchor form. Buttery bare clay delights the hands as these functional but magnificently elegant pots bring their vernal jubilance to your day-to-day.

Shop Martha Grover's pottery here.

Gallery Address:
2040 NW 6th St
Gainesville, FL 32609
352-810-0171

I know I'd visit this gallery if I lived in Gainesville still!

About Martha

Martha Grover is a functional potter, living in Bethel, Maine, creating thrown and altered porcelain pieces. She attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she received her undergraduate degree in Architecture. After going to Syracuse University in New York as a fifth year student in Ceramics, she decided to pursue a graduate degree in clay. In 2007, Martha received her MFA in ceramics from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Since then she was awarded the Fogelberg Fellowship for a residency at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Sage Scholarship for a summer residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. Martha completed a year long residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana in August 2009. She received the Taunt Fellowship at the Archie Bray Foundation in 2010. Her work can be found at the Red Lodge Clay Center, the Archie Bray Foundation, the Clay Studio of Missoula, Schaller Gallery, 18 Hands Gallery, Crimson Laurel Gallery, Charlie Cummings Gallery, and Cedar Creek Gallery. Her work has been published in Ceramics Monthly, Pottery Making Illustrated, Clay Times, 500 Pitchers, 500 Platters and Chargers, and 500 Vases. Martha's work was featured on the cover of Ceramic Monthly’s May 2010 issue.

Artist Statement

I seek to enhance the experience of interacting with functional objects. I work toward creating a sense of elegance for the user while in contact with each porcelain piece. Reminiscent of orchids, flowing dresses, and the body, the work has a sense of familiarity and preciousness.

Direct curves are taken from the female figure, as well as the fluidity of a dancer moving weightlessly across the floor. The space between elements is electrified with anticipation and tension. I think of the fluid visual movement around a piece, as a choreographer would move dancers across a stage. Transmitting desire - there is a sense of revealing and concealing, a layering of details that serves to catch our attention immediately and then the details draw us in, to make a closer inspection.

In our lives, we often move past the objects surrounding us at a very quick pace. My work generates a moment to pause. My goal is create an undeniable presence, one that acts as an invitation to explore the work thoroughly, taking time to know all of its many facets. Only through sustained interaction we can truly know and appreciate someone or something.

Artist of a different feather

 For nearly half a century, one man lived inside a giant yellow feathered suit so that millions of children around the world would never feel alone.

His name was Caroll Spinney.

Spinney had been a puppeteer for years before Sesame Street came along. He had done local television in Boston, performed at small festivals, and tried hard to build a career in a world that didn't make space for people like him. He was talented, but he hadn't found his moment. Then, at a puppetry festival in Salt Lake City in 1969, a performance went badly wrong. The lighting failed, the film projections didn't sync, and Spinney stood on stage in front of an unraveling show.

When it was over, a man came backstage and said five quiet words: "I liked what you were trying to do."

That man was Jim Henson.

Henson offered Spinney a role on a new children's television show about to launch on PBS. Spinney said yes immediately. The show was Sesame Street. The character he was given was a large, eight-foot-tall yellow bird named Big Bird. And at first, it simply wasn't working.

The original Big Bird was goofy and clumsy — almost like a country bumpkin in feathers. Spinney felt it. The scripts were thin, the character felt hollow, and by the end of his first year, he was on his way to Henson's office to resign. In the hallway, he crossed paths with Kermit Love — the puppetmaker who had built the Big Bird costume. Love convinced him to stay one more month and give it one more try.

That one month changed everything.

Spinney made a decision that no one told him to make. He stopped thinking of Big Bird as a clumsy adult character and started thinking of him as a child — a big, gentle, curious child who was experiencing the world for the very first time. The movements became slower and more innocent. The voice became warmer and softer. Big Bird stopped performing and started wondering. He became someone who didn't understand why things were the way they were, who asked questions that adults had long since stopped asking, and who felt things openly and without embarrassment.

The producers noticed immediately. Scripts began pouring in centered on Big Bird. The character became the emotional heartbeat of the street.

But the moment that showed the world who Big Bird truly was came on Thanksgiving Day, 1983.

Actor Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper — the kind, bow-tied storekeeper — since the very first episode, had died of a heart attack in December 1982. He was 74. The producers faced a difficult choice: write him out quietly, recast the role, or do something that no children's television show had ever dared to do — tell the truth.

They chose the truth.

Working with child psychologists and experts in grief, the writers crafted an episode in which Big Bird draws pictures of his friends as gifts, and when he gets to Mr. Hooper's picture, the adults must explain to him that Mr. Hooper has died and will not be coming back.

The episode aired on Thanksgiving Day so that families would be home together to watch it and talk about it afterward.

Inside the feathered suit, Caroll Spinney performed Big Bird's confusion and grief with such honesty that the adult cast members around him were visibly in tears during filming — not as actors, but as real people who had loved and lost a real friend. The episode won a Peabody Award and was selected by the Daytime Emmys as one of the 10 most influential moments in daytime television history. Decades later, people were still approaching cast members on the street to say: "That episode helped me explain death to my child."

This was the power of what Spinney had built.

Behind the scenes, the physical reality of playing Big Bird was extraordinary. Spinney had to hold one arm raised inside the costume's head for hours at a time, operating the beak while surrounded by hot studio lights, unable to see directly in front of him. In 2015, the demands of the costume became too much for his aging body, and he handed the physical role to another performer — though he continued to provide Big Bird's voice until his official retirement in October 2018, after 49 years.

He performed Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on more episodes of Sesame Street than any other cast member in the show's history.

Caroll Spinney passed away on December 8, 2019, at the age of 85.

Millions of children grew up feeling understood, included, and less afraid of the world — because one man, inside a hot feathered suit, decided to perform a giant yellow bird not as a character, but as a feeling.

He nearly quit in his first year.

Instead, he stayed — and gave the world something it didn't know it needed.