Robert Deane This is Me

 View all 9 references Web References

1. 1. Community Arts Center

   www.communityartscenter.org/bo - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/14/2008   Last Visited: 7/14/2008

   Bob Deane

2. 2. Main Line Art Center - Faculty

   www.mainlineart.org/instructor - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/25/2008   Last Visited: 5/25/2008

   Bowl, Robert Deane
   ...
   Robert Deane, BA, Ceramics, Bloomsburg University.Bob has taught ceramics and tie-dye at the Community Arts Center (CAC) in Wallingford and has conducted workshops with a variety of organizations.He has been a CAC Potters Guild member since 1991.His work has been exhibited in numerous juried gallery shows and craft sales.He is also known for digging and mixing his own clay body for his functional work. http://bobdeane.blogspot.com.Ceramics

3. 3. Philadelphia Inquirer | 08/05/2002 | Finding the stuff of art in a muddy creek

   www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/38 - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/5/2002   Last Visited: 8/5/2002

   Bob Deane, a Mr. Mud if ever there was one, simply sat on the stream bottom, patting the stuff across his shoulders and smiling almost blissfully.
   
   Every so often, Deane, a 37-year-old artist and potter, spreads the word to his cohorts: Time for another mud day.
   
   So here they were, in Crum Creek, getting the raw materials for creations that would bring new meaning to the phrase local pottery.
   
   "It's very dirty and labor-intensive," Deane said, nonchalantly dabbing another layer across his shoulder.
   
   "For some, it's a necessity," he said, adding with a sly grin, "for others, that's a plus."
   
   Deane, like most other potters, used to buy his clay from a pottery supplier.
   
   But one day as he was poking around just for fun in a local creek, he noticed a vein of clay.It was a Eureka! moment.
   
   Ever since, he has been scouting area streams and ponds for caches of clay - what some potters refer to as "wild clay."
   
   He has become a sort of connoisseur of creek bottoms, someone who's savvy about the stickier, ickier side of nature.
   
   Geologists say the area is rich in clay, which is pretty much merely mud, made finer. (Clay refers more to size than substance.Sand is big; soil is smaller; clay is kind of a soggy dust.)
   
   The region's celebrity clay is the high-quality white kaolinite from the aptly-named White Clay Creek in Chester County.
   
   The Leni-Lenape used it for pipes and pottery.
   ...
   But Deane loves this stuff, which he calls "young clay."He loves the idea that he's getting clay in one of its earliest forms, before it grows dense under the weight of additional sediment, or maybe just washes away in a big storm.
   
   He gets it at what, for him, seems an exquisite confluence - a moment of geologic time and a place near his home in a storybook cottage at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, where he creates pottery, teaches pottery, and works as a caretaker.
   
   The clay "has the touch of where I live and play," he said.
   
   Deane has lugged buckets of clay from various ponds and streambeds all over the area.
   
   The clay comes in all shades, from almost white to the dark gray of Friday's mud from the Crum Creek - evidence of organic activity.Or, more precisely, dead and decomposing microscopic critters.
   
   It even "smells a little more earthy," he had said earlier in the week, scooping some out of a barrel in his studio, squishing it through his fingers, holding it to his nose, and giving it an appreciative sniff.
   
   Out back near the kiln are pots of various clays waiting to be fired.
   ...
   Once, Deane even sloshed around in the Tinicum marsh area to get clay he hoped would contain heavy metals from nearby industrial sites.
   
   "Magnesium, nickel, and all those things we don't necessarily want in our drinking water tend to work pretty good in our glazes," he said mischievously.
   
   All this is much more than a matter of Deane wanting his materials for free.
   
   He believes that people have become way too accustomed to "getting everything out of plastic bags or boxes.We have become disconnected from the process of living."
   
   Collecting his own local clay instead of using bagged stuff from several states over reconnects him.
   
   And he loves the unpredictability of working with variable local mystery clays.He never knows for sure what the finished product will look like.
   ...
   Deane said he would turn Friday's mud into sculptural forms.