VERO BEACH — The Mad Potters pride themselves as low-budget, democratic, and idiosyncratic. The motto on their T-shirts hints at anarchy: “Caution: We Throw Things.” “We’re all on our own planet,” says member Karen Ekonomou. “And we want to stay that way.”
With the fourth annual Mad Potters Tea Party approaching, the club that proudly describes itself as a “loose association” would seem to be taking an existential risk: They are organizing yet another successful fund-raiser.
The Mad Potters don’t just throw pots. They throw a hell of a party. With each of its 72 members bringing a plate of food, and 16 making teapots to sell, the four-hour Friday night get-together spilling out of the lobby of the old Florida Theatre downtown, has come to be known as the go-to gathering in the Wonderland of the mainland arts district.
This year, those teapots will be arranged for display by Ekonomou, one of five potters who own and run Flametree Clay Art Gallery.
Located across from the Florida Theatre in the offices of the Cultural Council, the gallery opened in March and has already attained a following. At a recent packed show of invited local potters, each of the two dozen artists exhibiting sold works.
Unlike Flametree, the Mad Potters is not limited to working artists, Ekonomou says.
“We want to attract everyday people, new people that are just starting in pottery, not just artists that do this all the time.”
Ekonomou is herself a full-time artist now having left a full-time job as a medical courier earlier this month.
“I want more time to do my art and participate in shows.”
Ironically, she took that job to give herself a break from her art.
Born in Vero, Ekonomou worked her way up from a part-time job teaching gymnastics and arts and crafts at a community center in Sebastian, to becoming county director of recreation.
Ultimately she quit that job to go into business with her art – a business so successful that it nearly drove her mad herself.
For years, in the 1990s, she sold her hand-painted clothing through 36 gift shops and clothing stores along the East Coast.
It began after she made herself a shirt and wore it to a fishing tournament in the Bahamas – husband Mike is an avid angler.
“I must have had 10 people grabbing me and asking me where I got my shirt.”
When she got home to Vero, she set about making more. Then she took a batch to the late Louann and Bob Cummins, who owned Island Trading Company.
“I gave her 15 shirts on a Friday and told her, ‘Don’t pay me until they sell.’ She called me on Monday and they were completely sold out.”
Retailing at $57 a shirt, she knew she was onto something big. Bob Cummins, who worked as a sales rep for Catalina swimwear, began representing her line. She ended up working 14 hour days, seven days a week in a studio in her home.
“Then Bob Cummins retired, and the market for women’s accessories all of a sudden dried up. I was ready for a break.”
She called a doctor friend in the pathology lab and asked if she could volunteer.
Instead, he offered her a paying part-time job as a medical courier, transporting blood, tissue and occasionally body parts from doctors to labs.
The business grew as Vero’s medical community grew, and soon there were two full-time positions – her husband, Mike, stopped building homes to become a courier too. He will continue in that job.
Meanwhile, the couple, who met just out of high school and have been married 30 years, bought a heavily wooded lot on the island side of the 17th Street Causeway and built a home.
It is now filled floor to ceiling with Ekonomou’s artwork, brilliantly colored, playful pieces like the tin fish hanging from the kitchen ceiling, and Mexican-inspired trompe-l’oeil treatments extending from doorways, headboards and the hood over the range.
Not since her days teaching arts and crafts had she picked up a piece of clay.
It wasn’t until her neighbor Carol Price took her into Maria Sparsis’ downtown tea shop, Tea and Chi, that she suddenly became interested in pottery.
“I was admiring all of these teapots around and Maria said, ‘I made these.'”
Sparsis encouraged Ekonomou to take Sean Clinton’s raku class at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
“I loved it,” says Ekonomou, whose prior art techniques had been entirely self-taught. “I liked Sean’s class because it’s a lab type setting where you don’t have an instructor telling you what to do.”
Clinton’s specialty, raku, is a particularly random form of clay art, often maddeningly so, since it is prone to change and breakage.
“Pottery normally you have to heat up very slowly and cool down very slowly, otherwise it will shatter. With raku, you take it out of a 2000-degree kiln and you put it in a trash can and light it on fire. Twenty minutes later, you can take it out and it’s done.”
Her passion soon was “way out of control,” Ekonomou says. “By the third class I was looking for a kiln.”
Flametree Gallery started just as impulsively, when she and a group of potters all happened to stop in the tea shop at the same time.
“We were sitting around the tea table and Maria says, ‘You know there’s a space across the street. Is anyone interested in opening a gallery? Five of us raised our hands, and five of us started a business.”
The group signed the lease the next week.
“We took a trip to get our furniture, painted the place and were open by that Friday.”
The Mad Potters Tea Party is coming together with similar spontaneity.
Ekonomou says she is trying to keep her own organizational impulses in check as she gets into the final stages of preparation.
“I’m in charge of display,” she says, adding that she has to restrain herself from making it look too much like a gallery. “It needs to look a little bit disheveled, not too black-and- white. It’s definitely a pulled-together thing, which drives me a little crazy. But we want to keep it fun.”
The Mad Potters Tea Party is Friday, Dec. 2 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Theatre Plaza on 14th Ave. It is open to the public.
Contact Maria Sparsis by email maria@teaandchi.com or call (772) 563- 0620 or email Sean Clinton sean@sccreativeservices.com or call (772) 770- 2792 for more information.