Ewing resident Caryn Newman is the owner of Willowood Pottery on Willowood Drive. (Photo by Jeff Tryon.)
By Aliza Alperin-Sheriff
The fun thing about clay, other than playing with it, is that it’s as artsy as it is functional. This is a big deal for Caryn Newman, owner of Willowood Pottery on Willowood Drive, where she turns the earth itself into working pieces of art that do more than just look good on a shelf.
Newman, like the bowls, mugs, teapots, vases, trays, and plates she’s been making for 40 years, is shaped by the idea that art should be lived with. Loved. Used. Art on the wall is fine, but art in your hands is, well, always within your grasp. It is form and content. Beauty and utility.
Which works for her, because despite having what she says is a strong cultural background and a real love of art, she can’t draw very well. In college, she found herself in a pottery class and was struck with the sudden realization of “I can do this.”
When Newman, a Brooklyn native who moved to Kendall Park at age 10, graduated from Rutgers with a bachelor’s in philosophy, she was drawn to an apprenticeship at Great Barrington Pottery in the Berkshires with Richard Bennett. This was back before that area was the sought-after, rustic art studio destination it is today. The young artist had found her love and the career she wanted to pursue.
Her father, an engineer, was mildly unimpressed with her choice.
“He told me ‘That’s an avocation, not a vocation,’” she said.
But what young firebrand chasing her dream would listen? Newman “worked seven days a week and found a communal way to do it.” She got married to a fellow artist, and set about building her career as a ceramics maker.
The Berkshires and Maine, where Newman also studied for a while, is where she learned the Japanese styles of production. One of the major definers of the Japanese tradition is feet on a piece. This, Newman said, literally elevates a piece of pottery above the ground from which it was formed.
“My teacher used to say that just because [clay] comes from the ground, it doesn’t mean we should make dumpy pots,” she said.
Life went well for a while, but, as often happens, responsibilities (and a split) caused Newman to move. She left New England and came back to New Jersey, where she needed to raise two sons. This is the other side of Caryn Newman—the property manager. Newman got into property management to support her sons, eventually meeting Bob Hillier, who operates his architecture, planning, and design firm, Studio Hillier, in Princeton. Hillier, she says, needed someone to manage some of the firm’s properties in town, and she appreciates the wide berth Hillier gives her to do her job and run her pottery business.
For his part, Hillier is thrilled to have Newman on his side.
“Caryn has high energy, a get-it-done attitude, and high empathy, which is important for a service business like property management,” he said. “The fact that she is an artist gives her a keen eye, which is critical to make sure that the real estate properly presents itself.”
Make no mistake, though. Newman’s is not one of those stories in which someone abandons her true love for monetary gains only to rediscover her craft 20 years down the line. The entire time she worked her day job, Newman took a studio ceramics class every Monday night at Mercer County Community College for 20 years because she didn’t have her own studio space.
The classroom served as her default studio and her unbreakable tie to her art until a few years ago when sheremarried to “a great guy” who has zero to do with her artistic career opened her studio in her garage. By the way, it’s a tradition to name your pottery studio after the street it’s on, hence Willowood Pottery.
Newman spends most of her non-day-job time in the studio, where she teaches and makes pieces she so very much wants the world to hold in their hands. Her training and her practice these days revolves around the act of making multiples.
This is something peculiar to the type of artist who makes functional pieces. While most types of artists expend a great deal of energy crafting one-of-a-kind works, potters and master furniture makers often take great pride in being able to duplicate (and re-duplicate) a piece.
“My training taught me to make multiples of each object,” Newman said. “I will sit down and make a dozen mugs or a dozen bowls.”
She’s not kidding about the training. Part of the Japanese tradition is to master one form at a time before moving on. And in pottery, “there are no new shapes,” Newman said. Pottery is one of the oldest art forms and it’s been part of nearly every culture. Whatever shapes there are to mold, they were all discovered a long time ago.
“In two years, I only made four shapes,” she says. “One at a time, thousands of them.” And she threw them all away, because, well, that’s what you do when you’re leaning.
What comes from being a master potter is a strange and beautiful disconnection between Newman’s hands and her brain. At some point, she says, her hands just know what to do. They feel out the shapes, the interiors, the rims. And once a piece is done and it looks like the others, Newman knows she’s got something special.
In business terms, Newman still gets as elated with a sale as she did the first time anyone ever paid her for her work. “I met someone who came to a summer sale two years ago,” she said. “She bought a mug that cost $32.” Later, when Newman ran across the customer again, the woman told her “I think of you every morning when I have my coffee.”
This, Newman said, is one of the things that drives her as a business person and an artist. “I like that I’ve contributed to someone’s life. This is not some inert mug from a supermarket, it’s alive, it has life.”
Beyond her studio, Newman does have her work in galleries and exhibitions. She displays some of her pieces at Red Tulip Gallery, a co-op gallery in New Hope, where she shares space with about two dozen other artists. She also has had her work displayed at the Gallery at Mercer County Community College and some pieces were selected for a benefit for HomeFront in March.
From June 5 to 7, she will host an open house at Willowood that will include demonstrations. It is one of only two times a year that the studio is open to the public. The rest of the time, visits are by appointment.
And if on your visit to Willowood you find something that fits into your daily life, Newman will feel like she’s made a real connection, from her hands to yours.
“This is art you can live with,” she said. “I want to enrich people’s lives with it.”
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