VERO BEACH — The artists at Flametree Clay Gallery are used to working in three dimensions. So when space became available to double their size, the resulting gallery and office took shape quickly.
“We tiled this floor, we painted the walls, we drove to Ikea and bought 2,000 pounds of furniture,” says Maria Sparsis, a driving force behind the group that consistently draws in shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at downtown Vero’s art strolls, as it did again last Friday.
Even more significant than the extra space is the added talent whose wares are filling those new shelves. To the five original resident artists, who take turns staffing the shop, four more have come on board.
Those nine exhibit their pieces in a communal area adjacent to the offices of the Cultural Council across from the Florida Theatre building.
Another four artists have been invited to exhibit without the attendant gallery “babysitting” as Sparsis puts it.
Each of those artists has placed clay and porcelain pieces within cubes hanging on walls in the newly acquired space, once one of three offices leased by the Cultural Council, which will continue to occupy the remaining two.
“We heard from our landlord that the Cultural Council was looking for someone to take it over, so we decided to step up,” says Sparsis.
Still more space in the rear is now used for Flametree’s office.
It is a remarkable expansion for a fledgling group that found overnight success on the Friday strolls not only because their offerings are so varied, given all the creators, but also because of price points.
Objects made in a range of firing techniques and glazes include both the functional and the sculptural.
The vases, pots, plates and figurines frequently are priced at under $200, with some as low as $15.
That was the price on Hathaway Brewster’s sculptural white porcelain cups, for example.
Brewster displayed a set of six of the tall handle-less vessels, all microwavable and sturdy due to porcelain’s high-heat firing.
Pressed with rice while the clay is soft, a traditional Chinese method of decoration, the remaining impression when the rice burns off in firing allows light to pass through the thinner porcelain, a lacey break in the slab-like surface.
Another work, a low-slung Raku square that holds water in its center, is one of Brewster’s signature designs.
At the juried art shows where she has exhibited in California and Arizona, she has shown a cluster of similar pieces, some containing smooth stones, others with flowers, so viewers can get an idea of how to use them, she says.
While space was limited at Flametree, her works nevertheless drew the gaze of many.
“I heard I did sell something,” she said the next morning from her Moorings home. “But it was too crowded to get in there and see which one it was.”
Like many of the Flametree consortium, Brewster met her new cohorts at a class in clay at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
Taught by Walford Campbell, the workshop was for advanced students wanting to work on their own projects, primarily in porcelain.
Brewster herself has taught art for most of her professional life, having majored in sculptural art in college.
She and her husband, Galen, taught at a number of private schools, including the Middlesex School in Concord, Mass., St. Timothy’s outside of Baltimore and a day school in Phoenix, where they lived for 10 years.
Brewster has been coming to Vero since the 1950s; her parents met at a party in Old Riomar, where their parents, the Hathaways and the Tews, had homes since the 1920s.
Living on the various school campuses where they taught, Brewster has kept a studio in the couple’s summer home in Maine.
But she found the isolation of working from home was tamping down her creative drive. Since spending seven months a year here for the past two years, she finds her comrades in clay have fired up her interest.
“It’s been wonderful for me,” she says. “I have my own set-up in Maine, but I was all by myself. Now that I’m depending on the terrific facilities that the museum offers and the great instructors, it just sparked my interest all over again.”
As for joining Flametree, her first gallery presence, Brewster was approached by Sparsis, whose day job is running the tea shop, Tea and Chi, across the street from the gallery. Sparsis at the last minute brought Richard Pierce on board.
Husband of potter Chris Pierce, who recently put her work at Gallery 14’s new expansion down the avenue from Flametree, Richard Pierce only began working in clay when the couple recently retired to Vero.
“I took a class with Maria at the museum four years ago,” he says.
Pierce is one of Flametree’s four new resident artists, which means committing a couple of days a month to watching the shop. It was almost a spur-of-the-moment decision – Sparsis only contacted him last week, he says.
“I was the last one to come on board,” Pierce says. “She’s got me busy again. It’s given me an incentive to be productive.”
Selling out of product was initiative enough for Valerie Risher, a registered nurse with the Department of Health, whose clay bells were nearly gone only an hour into the Friday event.
Kim Mayo, another Vero potter joining the gallery, took up Raku in a museum class with Sean Clinton.
Along with Trav Blanton, another Vero potter, the newcomers include Fort Pierce artist Eileen Ditullioe. Two other artists, Jack Toepke and Jesus Minguez, work from their home base of Orlando.
Another clay artist, Coco Martin, who went by Marie Martin when she was a broker at Remax, has been taking classes for two years.
Her introduction to the technique known as “saggar firing” came at the table of an Under the Oaks art fair exhibitor, Brenda McMahon, who took third place in pottery at the fair in 2007.
Martin has taken two workshops with McMahon since then.
The technique involves making a separate clay vessel with holes in it called the saggar, within which a bisque-fired pot or sculpture is placed, coated with various oxides or wrapped in metal wires that color the clay in the firing process.
“It’s almost like tumbling,” says Martin.
One of her pieces was entered in Gallery 14’s Small is Big show, which also opened Friday night.
Along with inspiring artists to create more works, the gallery also affords them the opportunity to unburden themselves of projects weighing them down.
Sparsis points to a stack of Raku tiles in neutral tones, some with fruits emerging from the ecru glaze.
Now offered for sale individually as spoon rests, Sparsis had set out to redo her own kitchen backsplash with the tiles.
Somewhere along the production line, her interest waned.
“For some reason, possibly having made 104, I got over them,” she said.
