Unleash the imagination

Pottery studio opens in Covington

BY LINDA McGURK

COVINGTON, Ind. — Remember what it was like to play around with brushes and paint in elementary school art classes? To unleash your imagination on a blank canvas or a piece of clay?

If not, a new paint-your-own pottery studio in Covington vows to refresh your memory. At Potter’s Alley even people who don’t think they can paint will be able to bring out their inner artist, according to the studio’s owners Debra Duncan and Marie McCarty.

“Right around seventh grade people start to lose faith in their (artistic) ability. They start comparing themselves with others and expect perfection. But art is what you make it,” McCarty said. “I think everybody can be an artist if you have the right teacher and people who can bring it out of you.”

McCarty has spent the past couple of months preparing the space at 316 Liberty St. on the south side of the courthouse square (formerly Back Home Again Antiques) for the new venture, using leftover house paint to decorate the walls in a vibrant blue, purple, red, yellow and turquoise. Neatly placed on heavy-duty storage shelves along the walls are different pieces of pot-tery — dinner dishes, tea mugs, piggy banks, Christmas ornaments and more — waiting to get painted and fired in the two kilns in the back of the building.

The idea of the business is simple: for a studio fee — $7 for adults, $5 for children or $10 for a parent/child combination — plus the cost of the pottery, customers get to paint their own design on one or several pieces of their choice and have them fired to a durable finish in the kiln. A few days later, the ceramics are ready for pickup.

“We can also fire pieces for people who paint their own pottery at home but don’t have their own kiln,” Duncan said.

The plan for a ceramics studio started to form when McCarty taught pottery classes for children using air-dry clay at Duncan’s Fourth Street Gallery. Though the kids liked working with the clay, the need for a kiln soon became obvious.

“The air-dry clay is a little more fragile (than kiln-fired pottery) after it dries. You can make candy dishes and coin holders but you’re not going to get long-lasting, quality pieces with air-dry clay,” McCarty explained.

If there’s enough interest, McCarty will keep running her ceramics classes at Potter’s Alley. The duo also plans to market the studio as an option for social club meetings, scout meetings, business groups, bachelorette parties, baby showers, church group meetings and other social events. They will offer custom birthday packages and already have plans for several special events, including a wine tasting.

“This is interest driven,” Duncan said. “At the gallery, clay is what everybody comes in and says they want to do.”

“There’s nothing like this in Danville or Crawfordsville. You have to drive to Lafayette or Champaign, basically an hour each way, to do something like this, so I think we’ve found a niche,” McCarty said. Eventually, the two would like to have a complete ceramic studio with pottery wheels, where people can hand-build pottery from scratch, “But we’re doing one thing at a time,” Duncan said.

McCarty, who holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in art education and worked as an art teacher for six years, said there’s no reason anybody should feel intimidated by the prospect of creating their own art work.

“We have books for inspiration. If anybody comes in with an idea, say they want to do florals, we can always help them simplify (the pattern). There are all kinds of tricks you can use.” But, she added, “If somebody wants to get a piece of pottery for a gift and doesn’t want to paint it themselves they can tell me what they want and I can paint it for them.”

“We have a catalog full of hundreds of options, so you can special-order anything you want,” Duncan said.

IF YOU GO

Potter’s Alley at 316 Liberty St. in Covington, Ind., is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Satudays and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Contact Debra Duncan at (765) 793-2322 for more information.

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